Docile Bodies: The Social Context of Sex-based Disadvantage
Michel Foucault disputes the notion of the ‘natural’ body, for it cannot be divorced from its cultural signification and its role in socialisation[i]. The body is the channel that maintains and perpetuates gendered relations of power by ‘naturalising’ a regulatory idea that simplifies, or bifurcates, the biological categories of sex from a range of incongruent biological functions, bodily pleasures and the body’s materiality, to make a hetero-homogenous whole.
This ‘artificial unity’ serves to disguise the productive manifestation of power in relation to sexuality, that is, sex is an ‘unruly’ thing that must checked through power.[ii] But this ‘artificial unity’ is what feminists have extrapolated onto critiques of characterising a feminine body, which tends to conflate the biological capacities of women with their social, physical and intellectual capabilities.
Intent on avoiding the collapse of the social, and subsequently political, category of woman into biological functions, feminist theory sought to reject this essentialism in favour of a theory of social construction based on the distinction between sex (biology) and gender (social). If the social body is constructed, then gender does not derive from the ‘natural’ body, and women are capable, like men, of transcending the biological through reason and applied knowledge. The notion of equal rights, and their realisation, even at the most basic level, and as a political project, stands in direct debt to conceptualising the sexed body away from the social body.
Foucauldian theory, however, is an uncomfortable reminder that culturally-constructed gender cannot be un-problematically severed from sexed bodies, which have been overlooked in the struggle not just to discipline gender, but to identify it and secure it in the world through signification. At the centre of this regulatory system the body remains messy and unwieldy, under constant surveillance and control within a ‘machinery of power’ designed to optimise its utility and productivity.[iii] This body is not merely practiced and ‘docile,’ but has entered into, and sees itself within a state of ‘conscious and permanent visibility.’[iv] This state of self-awareness defines the modern subject.
Foucauldian theory endowed the politics of ‘everyday life’ with as much validity as macro-level socio-political and economic issues, from which women had traditionally been excluded.[v] It also opened up for debate the ‘so-called “personal problems” … especially all those “body issues” like sex, appearance and abortion’.[vi] The slogan ‘the personal is political’oes not deny a distinction between public and private.[vii] It does indicate there is a social division between public and private discourses, moderated by institutions that are deemed the right forum in which to discuss the ‘woman problem.’ [viii] Access to public life is arbitrated on the basis of equality, inconsistently applied, for such a conception will always exclude those who cannot gain access, whether through lack of education, poverty, or any other form of social exclusion that runs against power.
If the body is imagined as a locus point, or the ‘point of intersection’ or ‘interface’ between the biological and the social, as Braidotti suggests, then the notion of desire associates the embodied self to the socio-cultural conditions that constitute its reality.[ix] It is a desire for recognition and personhood. Because sexualisation is fundamental to the processes of socialisation, representations of the female body are fundamental not just to the formation of feminine identity, but of identity full stop. The individual is not negotiating between subjectivity, a fixed biological essence, or competing social obligations, but is fully participant, either through self-awareness, complicity or utility, in the currents of power of the social body. This is only a starting point and, it must be noted, one that also nears the view from ‘nowhere,’[x] if one is not attendant to all the assumptions that must be held in place to assume that an individual is able to access and utilise his or her own agency informed by the contradictions inherent in the lived world.
References and Additional Reading
[i] (Foucault, 1984: 80-82) proposed that power is materially produced from historical contingencies, and knowledge is the non-material aspect of the flow of power between individuals and social groups with vested interests in perpetuating the status quo. By insisting on the historical specificity of a body that is at the locus of social control, Foucauldian theory (decidedly gender-neutral) is central to the questioning of the subjugation of women, because biological differences are the foundations that ground, naturalise and legitimise gender inequality. Unarguably, biological functions are associated with distinct social characteristics, capabilities and divisions of labour, with women defined by their reproductive and physical capacities.
[ii] Michel Foucault (1976) The Will to Knowledge: Volume 1 of the History of Sexuality (London: Penguin Books, 1998), pp. 151-154
[iii] Foucault, 1975: 138-139
Michel Foucault (1975) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1975)
In ‘Docile Bodies’, Discipline and Punishment (1975:135-169) Foucault argues there is no single centralised authority: rather, power dynamics exist between groups of people that regulate and discipline bodies to keep them docile. His seeming disregard for the issue of sexual difference is consistent with his strategies of thinking in terms other than the polarities of the masculine and the feminine. Given that the construction of sexuality around sexual difference has been a tool of subjection for centuries, his suggestion for a different emancipatory strategy aims towards a redefinition of the body.
[iv] Foucault, 1975: 201
[v] Nancy Fraser (1989) Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis, MN: Polity Press) p. 26
[vi] Carol Hanisch 1969 quoted in Gemma Edwards ‘Personal Life and Politics’ in Vanessa May ed. Sociology of Personal Life (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)p. 150
[vii] Carol Hanisch, Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation 1969
<http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html> [18 April 2015]
[viii] Lourdes Benería and Gita Sen. “Class and Gender Inequalities and Women’s Role in Economic Development: Theoretical and Practical Implications.” Feminist Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, 1982, pp. 157–176.
[ix] Rosi Braidotti (1994). Nomadic Subjects Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 105.
[x] Thomas Nagel (1986), View From Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press), who says humans have the ability to view the world in a detached way.
