Deveaux, Monique. "Feminism and Empowerment: A Critical Reading of Foucault."

Deveaux, Monique. "Feminism and Empowerment: A Critical Reading of Foucault." Feminist Studies 20.2 (1994): 223-47.

In this essay, Deveaux surveys three waves of feminist literature influenced by different aspects of Foucault’s work related to the problematic of power: first, literature that draws on Foucault’s analysis of the “docile-bodies” thesis and the notion of “biopower,” which focus on the relationship between power and bodies; the second, literature that finds insights from Foucault’s later work on the power and resistance, a model that explains the multiple, interweaving, yet agonistic power relations; the third, postmodern feminist literature on sexual and gender identity that hinges on Foucault’s assertion that prevailing categories of sex identity are constructed by the proliferate subjectifying discourses on sexuality in the transition to a modern regime of power.

Deveaux argues that both the paradigm of power and the treatment of the subject in these three waves of Foucauldian feminist literature are inadequate for feminist projects that “take the delineation of women’s oppression and the concrete transformation of society as central aims.” She suggests that Foucault’s thoughts have the tendency to conceptualize the subject at the expense of women’s specific experiences with power, and the model of agonistic power relations cannot account for the process of empowerment. She proposes that feminist literature on empowerment – for instance, Audre Lorde’s ideas of the erotic power and the connections between agency and self-understanding, and Patricia Hill Collins’ writings on empowerment of black American women through changed consciousness that results from both internal transformations and their effects on the community – as a new direction of the feminist inquiries, which need to center on “the subject’s interpretation and mediation of her experience” rather than “the how and why of power” that Foucauldian feminist discourse centers on.

This essay maps out critically the overview picture of feminist literature related to Foucault’s thoughts and thus a very good essay for students who are not very familiar with the subject to gain a general idea. The new direction she offers a practical way for feminist to utilize the resource Foucault can offer, which I find very productive.