Diamond, Irene, and Lee Quinby. "American Feminism and the Language of Control."

Diamond, Irene, and Lee Quinby. "American Feminism and the Language of Control." Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance. Eds. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988. 193-206.

In this chapter Diamond and Quinby examine how the language of rights used by contemporary feminists intersected with and amplified the problematic discourse of control of the body and sexuality. The authors point out that the discourse of rights finds its roots in the Enlightenment’s uncritical acceptance of science, which also has been partaken by Marxism and liberalism. They find Foucault’s later work helpful in understanding the “technology,” or the process of normalization, of this “scientific thinking” of Enlightenment, and in providing alternatives to resist its domination. Specifically, the authors draw on Foucault’s analysis of a power induced “deployment of sexuality” in a “scientized society,” and of the play of “disciplinary power,” or “bio-power” in normalizing bodies and pleasures. To the authors, the discourse of rights complies with the deployment of sexuality by speaking in a pervasive “capitalistic, scientific term,” which is “devoid of the ambiguities and richness of human experience.” The authors thus propose a “contextual feminism,” which, instead of being constructed around bodies or “any other totalizing principle,” is grounded in “the conflicts and joys of women’s lives.” In this way, the authors seek to underscore the “importance of the ways language functions to create our subjects.”

This approach recognizes the Foucauldian idea of “multiplicity of human pleasures,” and “cultivation of self-reflexivity” as resistance. What they do is to desexualize the oppression of women and recognize a broader context. This approach is contested by some other feminists such as Winifred Woodhull (see Woodull, "Sexuality, Power, and the Question of Rape").