Feminism, Foucault and the politics of the body

Abstract

Sitting down to consider the unusually strong attraction that Foucauldian thought has held for contemporary feminism, it occurred to me that I might learn something from consulting personal history. What did I think when I first encountered the work of Michel Foucault? I can remember, when I was a graduate student in the late seventies, rebelling against the infatuation with poststructuralist thought which was then beginning to simmer in the ‘continental wing’ of my department. I had not the slightest knowledge of the substance of Derrida’s or Foucault’s ideas. My aversion was based solely on what I felt to be the aestheticised and elitist accoutrements of poststructuralism. I had tried one of the most popular of the early courses and found the conversations pretentious and the atmosphere cultish. The language was too self-conscious, too eroticised for my tastes; I felt instinctively that I could never wear such haute couture with comfort and conviction. My prejudice (against poststructuralist ideas; I never did learn to wear the clothes) was challenged in 1980 when I finally read Foucault, on assignment for a book review of The History of Sexuality: An Introduction which had just been published, I had been asked to do the review by my dissertation adviser, who was the book review editor of the journal, and who apparently (and correctly) had recognised a deep intellectual affinity that I had yet to discover.

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