MacCannell, D., and MacCannell, J.F. "Violence, Power and Pleasure: A revisionist reading of Foucault from the victim perspective."

MacCannell, D., and MacCannell, J.F. "Violence, Power and Pleasure: A revisionist reading of Foucault from the victim perspective." Up Against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions between Foucault and Feminism. Ed. C. Ramazanaglu. London: Routledge, 1993.

In this chapter, MacCannell and MacCannell examine Foucault's two central concepts, power and pleasure, in relation to violence to women from the perspective of victims by analyzing discourse of victims from intra- or inter-personal violence. They argue that Foucault's thought is "[u]topian valorisation of the de-sexualisation of sex and corresponding theoretical neutrality" and thus is very limited when used to empower women to subvert their oppression. The authors offer a critique of the "neutral" character that Foucault grants power, as well as his thoughts on gaze and violence and argue that Foucault's idea of power and violence only accounts for "philosophical violence" but not for "everyday violence," or empirical violence, which is masked from both the assailants and their victims "behind a screen of 'good intentions' or high moral ideals." In their following analysis, the authors extend Foucault's idea of gaze and make distinctions between the two types of gaze associated with violence -- the instrumental gaze associated with direct violence, and the identificatory gaze associated with administrative violence. Although the author find Foucault's discourse on pleasure and guilt "potentially most instructive for the troubled subjectivity of the victim trying to re-connect with her own pleasure," they are dissatisfied with what they deem as Foucault's "goal of a non-sexed, generic jouissance," which to them is "debatable in light of the everyday experience of women." Further, Foucault's quest for "innocence in sexual sin" is thought to "eventually led him to participate in a movement to decriminialise rape." Here, the authors are deeply sympathetic with the victims of violence and concern about the masking of inequality that can result from Foucault's "Utopian," "philosophical," "neutral," and "non-sexual" approach to power, violence, and pleasure.

The authors base their, I would say, almost militant criticism of Foucault using discourse analysis, which, as they articulate in the very opening of the essay, is paradoxically a Foucauldian methodology. This essay reflects the ambivalent place Foucault is placed in feminist theory and criticism.