Sawicki, Jana. "Queering Foucault and the Subject of Feminism."

Sawicki, Jana. "Queering Foucault and the Subject of Feminism." The Cambridge Companion to Foucault. Ed. Gary Gutting. 2nd ed. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

In this chapter, Sawicki defends Foucault in response to the feminist critical theorists and the “queer” poststructuralist feminist theorists represented respectively by Nancy Fraser and Judith Butler. Answering Fraser’s accusations of Foucault’s ambiguity in clarifying the nature of his rejection of the “foundationalist and universalist metaphilosophical ideals” of Enlightenment humanism – as a philosophical or a practical project, and his failure to provide a “new paradigm of human freedom,” Sawicki argues that Fraser “fails to appreciate the ‘queerness’ of Foucault’s project.” Through an analysis of Foucault’s far more complex than oppositional relationship to Enlightenment humanism (which I think can only be described as “queer”), Sawicki points out that Foucault’s project is not concerned with the legitimacy of critique, but with a “new understanding of autonomy,” which requires “an empirical inquiry into the historical limits of our self-understandings,” and which leads to a new direction of critique – “critiquing critique.” It is with this detachment from established political ideals and theories, to Sawicki, that Foucault “approach[es] politics from behind.” Butler, on the other hand, advances the Foucauldian ideas of the operation of biopower and subjection through the lens of psychoanalysis, and introduces the play of the psyche and the Freudian concept of recognition in the formation of the subject (and our dear ,old Hegel would say, “I said that before any of these kids!”) into the process of subjection and subjugation. Sawicki comments that Butler’s theory of subjection is “remarkably Foucaultian in spirit,” but has gone “further than Foucault ever went.” Sawicki then defends Foucault by saying that Foucault’s concern about the normalizing impulse that would lie in such a theory.

This source is helpful in critically understanding the two very important receptions of Foucault in feminism. When consider the idea of "subjectification," I feel that Foucault's approach to psychoanalysis is more of a historical one, which sees psychology or psychoanalysis--the science of understanding our own psyche--as an instrument instead of a methodology. That's probably why he didn't go as far as Butler--because any discourse, including the emerging scientific discourse in the 19th century, can be essentializing. I think here Sawicki's explanation is fair. Also see Fraser, "From Discipline to Flexibilization? Rereading Foucaul in the Shadow of Globalization" and Butler, "Bodies and Power Revisit".