McNay, Lois. Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender, and the Self.

McNay, Lois. Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender, and the Self. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993.

Lois McNay's book is one of the earlier works that address the dilemma that feminism and other emancipatory politics encounter when they consider the implications of poststructural thinking on their work. In the case of feminism, on the one hand, extensive work has been drawn upon poststructural assertion that subjectivity is discursively constructed rather than fixed, which has been used in various ways. On the other hand, feminists are increasingly asking how far poststructural thought can be drawn on since it is void of value judgments and truth claims that feminist politics rests necessarily rest on. Acknowledging this dilemma, McNay proposes that Foucault's final work The Use of Pleasure, The Care of the Self and various interviews and essays are valuable resources that opens up new possibilities and new directions for productive convergence of feminism and poststructural thinking. McNay argues that Foucault's ideas of the self, and technologies of subjectification is his complements to his earlier analysis of technologies of domination where self is passively constructed by power. The analysis of technologies of subjectification, on the other hand, acknowledges the active practices of the self in constructing its own identity. McNay sees this significant turn in Foucault's work to offer valuable implications to feminism. She opposes to formulate a postmodern feminism, but she believes that Foucault's later work on the self is resonant to the emancipatory themes of feminism, which precisely hinder it to be categorized as postmodern.

Despite this, McNay points out Foucault's limitations, namely, Foucault's lack of "any basic guidelines or collective aims" that is necessary for the self to be called "out of the self on to a plane of generality where it is reminded of its responsibilities to other individuals in society." This criticism has become one of the "classic" criticisms of Foucault. To me, it seems that McNay is still faced with the same dilemma that has been haunting feminists and other thinkers and activists of emancipatory politics. This book has five chapters, each dealing with a specific theme in feminist theory. They are "Power, Body and Experience," "From the Body to the Self," "Ethics of the Self," "The Problem of Justification," and "Self and Others." Unfamiliar with these later works of Foucault, I'm nevertheless (or maybe therefore) intrigued by this book.