Poststructural Subjects and Feminist Concerns: An Examination of Identity, Agency and Politics in the Works of Foucault, Butler and Kristeva
Katherine Lowery Cooklin
Language: English
Pages: 379
ISBN: 2:00143817
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
I address the question of whether poststructuralist theories of subjectivity can
accommodate emancipatory politics. I examine the models of subjectivity offered by
Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva, and I evaluate these models in terms of
their ability to provide an ethical and political framework that does not perpetuate
oppression, and in particular that should be adopted by feminists. In chapter 1, I argue
that Foucault reduces the subject to a placeholder within a discursive systemand
forecloses the possibility of meaningful agency and emanicpatory politics. Because
nothing escapes the discursive system, Foucault eliminates the subject’s capacity for critical reflection, agency and intervention on the systems of oppression. Given
Foucault’s description of power and of subjugated knowledge, the only promise that
Foucault holds is for total contestation and constant transgression. I examine the utility
of Foucault’s work for feminist politics and conclude that a better alternative should be
sought. In chapter 2, I examine the utility of Foucault’s work for feminist politics, and
offer a critique of some feminist appropriations of Foucault. In chapter 3, I examine
Judith Butler’s theory of subjectivity. I argue that, like Foucault, Butler reduces subjects
to placeholders within an inherently oppressive system and forecloses the possibility of a
subject’s capacity for critical reflection on that system. Throughout this chapter I address
problems for feminist politics. Chapter 4 is a critique of attempts to find a meaningful
account of agency in Butler’s work by recasting her as an existentialist. In chapter 5, I
turn to Kristeva’s theory of signification and subjectivity. I argue that Kristeva does not
reduce the subject to the discursive system, and that her theory allows for meaningful
agency. I argue that Kristeva’s theory can be used to diagnose social oppression. I show
how Kristeva’s theory can be used to diagnose fascist movements and sexism. I argue
that her theory holds promise for a remedy to oppression.
least, Foucault claims as much. It is unclear, however, why Foucault now takes the terms “voluntary” and “intentional” as referring to positive actions when his previous work aimed at “unmasking” notions of “voluntary” and “intentional” actions as disciplinary and normalizing strategies that were the effects of power. Foucault identifies sexual pleasure, or more specifically, the use of sexual pleasure as a means by which the Greeks transformed themselves. Unlike the Victorians, who medicalized
exercised by subjects. Subjects do not consciously use power to direct themselves toward their freely chosen ends, not even ends chosen within a set of restricted options. Rather, subjects’ ends are directed by the subjectless power strategies. Because subjects are the products of power effects, and can never escape this position, there is no point from which subjects can evaluate or interpret their positions or choices. One then could not measure whether one’s choices are choices, or merely the
a view of identity that is at odds with a conception of radical and plural democracy ...”189 Mouffe argues that it is only by theorizing the subject as fragmentary and discontinuous ensemble of subject positions that we can “theorize the multiplicity of relations of subordination.”190 This “plurality does not involve coexistence, one by one, of a plurality of subject positions but rather the constant subversion and overdetermination of one by the others...” The first point that I would like to
necessary. In the place of the law of heterosexual coherence, we see sex and gender denaturalized by means of a performance which avows their distinctness and dramatized the cultural mechanism of their fabricated unity...the notion of gender parody defended here does not assume that there is an original which such parodic identities imitate. Indeed the parody is of the very notion of an original...so gender parody reveals that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an
distinction between expression and performativity is quite crucial, for if gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows or produces its cultural signification are performative, then there is no preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured...As a consequence, gender [or other identity] cannot be understood as a role one plays which either expresses or disguises an interior ‘self’. Rather, the reality of identity is created through sustained social