Page 143 - Cultural Theory

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••• Tim May and Jason Powell •••

West, starting from the sixteenth century on. The West could never have
attained the economic and cultural effects that are unique to it without the
exercise of that specific form of rationality.
(Foucault, 1991: 117)

Foucault’s contribution, however, is to locate the ways in which ‘bio-power’ and dis-
ciplinary techniques construe the body as an object of knowledge. For example, The
History of Sexuality depicts the dominion with which nineteenth-century experts con-
structed a hierarchy of sexualized bodies and divided the population into groups of
‘normal’, ‘deviant’ and ‘perverted’.
While Foucault’s definition of the body has inspired numerous debates, the task of
refinement and problematization has largely been the province of feminist scholars.
Foucault has been criticized for his lack of sensitivity and attention to gender
inequality and women’s history, thereby requiring theoretical revision in order to
overcome such limitations (Powell and Biggs, 2000). Feminists have stressed that the
body is both a site of regulation, where gendered identities are maintained and a site
of resistance, where they are undone and challenged. McNay agrees with Foucault
that ‘sexuality is produced in the body in such a manner as to facilitate the regula-
tion of social relations’ (1993: 32). However, contra Foucault, she notes that not
all aspects of sexuality, corporeality and desire are products of power relations.
Passionate social relationships do not necessarily facilitate introspective forms of sur-
veillance. ‘Relationships’ can transform disciplinary spaces and engage in disrupting
practices. Coupled with this, Butler (1990: 141) claims that body performances that
connect women to fictional feminine identities can be disrupted to expose the dis-
cretionary contingency of identities.

The individual

If disciplinary gaze is a first step, then ‘interiorization’ of that gaze is the second.
Foucault’s social contructivism, consisting of classification and dividing practices, tech-
nologies of the self and political grids of bodies and populations has fuelled his critics’
claims that he deprives human subjectivity of agency (Smart, 1983). Minson claims
that Foucault burdens the body with being the true subject of history and ‘the flicker-
ing counterpart to the dull individual of sociology’ (1985: 93). Foucault emphasizes
two important aspects of individual agency that counteract his critics. First, the victims
of modernity’s disciplinary matrix – the prisoners, patients, and children – can subvert
the regulatory forms of knowledge and subjectivity imposed upon them. Second, while
power/knowledge relations construct governable individual subjects, such subjects are
not fixed in their conditions of ruling and do become agents of resistance to them
(Foucault, 1977; 1991a). To investigate the ‘how’ of power then requires:
taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting
point … it consists of using this resistance as a chemical catalyst so as to bring
to light power relations, locate their position, find out their point of application

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