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

The Paradoxical World of Foucault 29
under discussion is sex, and those who initiate sex are adult men, while the
discursive bodies upon which sex is practiced belong to children or adolescents
(boys or girls), Foucault suddenly abandons his brilliant insight on the
body as a location where docility is achieved through minute operations of
power. IS
Nancy Fraser enters this debate by pointing to multiple ambiguities in
Foucault's concept of power. Foucault stressed that power permeates eerything.
that "power-free cultures, social practices, and knowledges are in principle
impossible." He also claimed that his own description of modern power
was "normatively neutral." However, Foucault's descriptions of the modem
power/knowledge axis are filled with phrases such as "domination" and " subjugation"
(Fraser 1989, 29). Even when one agrees that all cultural practices
involve power relations, Fraser sees some serious problems in Foucault's conceptualization
of power: "It doesn't follow that all forms of power are normatively
equivalent, or that any social practices are as good as any others. Indeed,
it is essential to Foucault's own project that he is able to distinguish better
from worse sets of practices and forms of constraint. But this requires greater
normative resources than he possesses" (32). Fraser compares Foucault unfavorably
to both Max Weber and Habermas. In contrast to Weber, Foucault
did not make systematic distinctions among various forms of power such
as "authority, force, violence, domination and legitimation." However, in
the tradition of Nietzsche and the earlier Frankfurt School theorists Theodor
Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Foucault critiqued Western rationality. This
led him to a dead end, for two reasons, Fraser concludes. First, he proposed
no criteria for distinguishing forms of power that dominate and subjugate
from those that express emancipatory impulses. Second, he endorsed "a onesided,
wholesale rejection of modernity, " without suggesting anything to put
in its place (33). This position was not so far removed from the late Adorno's
"negative dialectics."
The tension between feminism and Foucault can also be located in his
work on sexuality studies. Foucault turned to a genealogy of (male) homosexual
relations in the Greco-Roman world in his last two published books.
But he was not an enthusiastic supporter of the gay and lesbian liberation
movement in France and Western Europe in the 1970s. He did not share the
new enthusiasm for "gay pride." He feared that the new emphasis on a gay
lifestyle would sustain the binary division between heterosexual (normal)
and homosexual (pathological) in the modern world. In his view, upholding
a gay identity meant acknowledging one's pathology, for "to betray the law
of normality means continuing to recognize its existence" (cited in Nye 1996,
234). One had to break altogether with notions of a specific homosexual