Woodhull, Winifred. "Sexuality, Power, and the Question of Rape."

Woodhull, Winifred. "Sexuality, Power, and the Question of Rape." Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance. Eds. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988. 167-76.

In her essay, Winifred Woodhull challenges the Foucauldian idea that the preferred strategy to resist sexual oppression is to “‘desexualize’ sexuality by multiplying the diffusing pleasures, in order to cancel the now-obsolete understanding of it as a circumscribe domain fundamentally opposed to power and the law,” which is consistent with new developments within women’s movement in the 1980’s, namely, the tendency of advancing beyond the realm of sexuality and recognizing sexuality as “bound up with economic and political structures, language and philosophy, the world of work and the world of play.” Woodhull, however, finds the desexualization strategy problematic, especially when we are brought to consider the issue of rape. Woodhull argues that “rape, or the fear of rape, are experienced by women sexually, not just as domination,” in a culture where “many forces converge to define women as essentially sexual beings.” Legal battles against rape to Woodhull are not what bring “the social relations of production and reproduction” necessary therein. To Woodhull, we must recognize that “the very coherence of the bourgeois state depends upon an illusory legal equality masking not only economic inequality and class domination but also the general social and sexual subordination of women.” The notion of “taking control of our bodies” that serves as the ground for legal rights battles is tied to the capitalist ideology of individualism, and therefore, drawing on Marxist critical theory, Woodhull proposes a collective rather than individual strategy for women to fight against rape, organizing themselves with other women to protect themselves and thus creating an alternative to the forced options between problematic “protection” and no protection at all.

This is probably one of the most polemic criticisms on this blog. I think Woodhull points out probably the biggest difficulty in applying Foucault's theory in feminism and, especially, feminist activism. To some extent, Foucault did not focus his concerns on the collective struggle of the mass. In other words, he was interested in how the individual subject is constructed historically in power relations. However, in the case of rape, there is an urgency that Foucault's "saintly" theory cannot address. I think Woodhull has made a good case here addressing this urgency.