foucault-and-the-iranian-revolution-janet-afary

26 Fouca u lt's Discourse
countering the prevailing theories of the time (including some forms of feminism),
which equated the post-Enlightenment period with the emergence of
greater democracy and greater freedoms, at least for the middle classes.
Thus, in each of his major writings Foucault privileged premodern social
relations over modern ones. In Madness and Civilization, he argued that the
Renaissance regarded madness as a fact of life and even endowed it with a
certain amount of wisdom and creativity. In Discipline and Punish, he held
that the seemingly more brutal disciplinary practices prevalent until the mideighteenth
century exerted less control over mind and body than modern
forms of punishment. And in The History of Sexuality, he claimed that premodern
marriages of the elite, which were based on political and economic alliances,
allowed for greater sexual freedom, including same-sex relations, and
were hence more desirable when compared to the monogamous, heterosexual
marriages of modern bourgeois society and their normalizing power. Foucault's
one-sided critique of modernity and his minimizing of the harsh and
confining disciplinary practices of the premodern world-including those
that shackled women's sexuality-may explain his problematic relationship
to the issue of women's rights, a subject to which we now turn. 9
Foucault and Feminism: A Nonreciprocal Affa ir?
There is very little in Foucault's writings on women or women's rights. At
the same time, Foucault's theoretical writings have had an immense influence
on a generation of feminist academics, even though his attitude toward
feminism was ambiguous and sometimes even dismissive. As many of the
contributors to Diamond and Quinby's 1988 volume have argued, feminism
and Foucault converge on several points concerning theories of power. Both
identify the body as a site of power, a location upon which domination is established
and docility is accomplished. Both point to the minute operations
of power in all spheres of life (family, economics, science, law, literature,
etc.), rather than focusing on the power of the state or capital alone. Both
speak of the crucial role of discourse in constructing hegemonic power and
in exploring potential challenges that might emerge from marginalized discourses.
10 As a result, a number offeminists have found Foucault's theoretical
insights in works such as Discipline and Punish and volume 1 of The History of
Sexuality extremely important to their own work (Bartky 1990; Bordo 1988;
Deveaux 1 994; Sawicki 1988; Hekman 1990; Butler 1990). Other feminists
have found Foucault's concept of the technologies of the self, which appeared
in his later works in the 1980s, to be useful, since Foucault moved from an
exclusive focus on the domineering forms of power, or technologies of dom-