Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice (4 page)

My discussion centers on the gendered shaping of bodies in patriar- chal societies. In this chapter I focus on female genital mutilation, routine secular male circumcision, and female appearance or ‘‘beauty’’ norms. Foucault’s work examines in detail the role of the body in main- taining social norms. Although Foucault does not develop a specific theory of gender, and seldom relates his ideas to gender hierarchy,
1
many feminists have adapted his work on the body, in particular, to the analysis of gender. Moreover, the issue of the shaping of bodies serves to illustrate many aspects of Foucault’s theory, including subject formation, power, and genealogy.

Foucault has been influential for many feminists because his ap- proach to power and his focus on the body engage with feminist con-

1. This fact has led many feminists to criticize him for perpetuating the androcentricity of political philosophy. See Lois McNay,
   Foucault and Feminism.
   

   cerns. His idea of power is helpful to feminist analysis of patriarchy since it addresses ideas of social construction and history in a way that can illuminate issues of gender. Many feminists have engaged with his work, whether to adopt his methods or to criticize them.
   2
   In general, they have focused on his theory of power and discipline. In this chapter I discuss that work, but I also investigate how the Foucauldian concept of genealogy can assist feminist and liberal analysis.
   

   Discipline and Female Appearance Norms
   

   A crucial element of Foucault’s conception of power is his recognition that it can both repress
   and
   create. Modern political philosophy, and certainly liberal political philosophy, focuses overwhelmingly on the repressive elements of power, particularly as manifested in the state. Instead, Foucault focuses on ‘‘the new methods of power whose opera- tion is not ensured by right but by technique, not by law but by normal- ization, not by punishment but by control, methods that are employed on all levels and in all forms that go beyond the state and its appara- tus.’’
   3
   Foucault explains why these methods of power are ‘‘new’’ in
   Dis- cipline and Punish,
   which charts the shift in systems of punishment since the Middle Ages. This shift takes two closely related forms: a shift from an overt focus on the body to an overt focus on the soul (although, as will be seen, Foucault asserts that body and soul are connected in important ways), and a shift from a largely repressive to a more creative power. It is Foucault’s contention that, first, power currently operates more significantly through creation than through repression and, sec- ond, that power is more effective the less it focuses on crude repressive mechanisms. In other words, a focus on power as a repressive force misses a great deal of power, and misses the most effective power. This argument has significant implications for liberalism because it demonstrates how the liberal concern to limit the repressive elements of power (explicit state laws and institutions) both ignores and leaves intact the creative elements of power (social construction of options, preferences, and subjects), which are, in fact, the most effective. In
   

2. For a list of such work, see Caroline Ramazanog` lu,
   Up Against Foucault,
   3. See also McNay,
   Foucault and Feminism.
   

3. Michel Foucault,
   The Will to Knowledge,
   89.
   

   other words, limiting the repressive power of the state merely alters the form that power takes. It need not, in itself, increase autonomy.
   

   Foucault describes the Panopticon, a prison designed by Jeremy Bentham. The Panopticon consists of cells arranged in a circle around a central watchtower. Each cell has a barred door covering the whole of the internal wall, and a window to the outside that illuminates the cell. As a result, surveillance is very efficient: each cell can be seen from the central watchtower. Guards do not need to walk down corridors, look through peep-holes, or lift flaps. Moreover, the Panopticon has another feature that renders it even more effective: the central watchtower has blinds at the windows (an updated version would be a one-way mirror), ensuring that the prisoners never know whether or not the guard is looking at them. Without the blinds, a prisoner would know when the guard was looking away and could use the opportunity to misbehave; with the blinds, the prisoner must always behave, for a guard may always be watching. What this means, Foucault explains, is that the prisoners become self-policing. There does not need to be a guard pres- ent, enforcing compliance, because the prisoners become their own guards. The surveillance of the prison guard becomes an internal self- surveillance, and obedience becomes unconscious and habitual. To begin with, prisoners are self-policing because they are consciously afraid that a guard might be watching, but over time, they obey without conscious fear or reflection. Crucially, obedience becomes habitual at the level of the body: Foucault wants to escape the Enlightenment dis- tinction between the mind and the body and demonstrate that the body plays a role in ensuring our compliance to social norms. Power is em- bodied when certain forms of behavior feel right to us, when our bodies ‘‘naturally’’ take on the correct position for a certain situation.
   

   The Panopticon illustrates, for Foucault, the general operation of power in modern societies.
   4
   Power is transformed from a repressive to a creative force: ‘‘The exercise of power is not added on from the out- side, like a rigid, heavy, constraint, to the functions it invests, but is so subtly present in them as to increase their efficiency by itself increasing their own points of contact.’’
   5
   Power is not a repressive force coming from outside the individual, constraining her actions, but a creative force manifested in the individual’s everyday life. As in the Panopticon,
   

4. Michel Foucault,
   Discipline and Punish,
   205. 5. Ibid., 206.
   

social norms do not need to be enforced by the explicit attention of others. Instead, enforcement and the corresponding surveillance is in- ternalized by each individual, and is reinforced whenever the individ- ual acts in compliance with the norm, or interacts with others in accor- dance to social expectations. This reinforcement is the product of two processes: the threat of surveillance and thus sanctions for nonconfor- mity (for example, feelings of embarrassment or shame at acting inap- propriately in a given social situation, fear of not fitting in), and sheer force of habit. Foucault contends that power works to create individu- als, to form them as subjects, and that it does so at the level of the body as well as the level of the mind. When the body has been conditioned to obey a rule or act in a certain way, there is no need to seek compli- ance at the level of the mind as well, for compliance has been made habitual and does not need to be consciously directed.

A premise of this argument is that the human body itself, in the particular form it takes in any one society, is the product of social forces, the product of power. The notion of the female body as created rather than natural is familiar to feminism, as documented by writers such as Germaine Greer, Andrea Dworkin, Susan Bordo, Judith Butler, Naomi Wolf, and Sandra Lee Bartky.
6
Indeed, Bordo reminds us that the feminist understanding of the cultural construction of the body extends back at least as far as Mary Wollstonecraft.
7
As an example of feminist work on the body, consider Greer’s
The Female Eunuch.
Greer anticipates Foucault in her discussion of the female body and its distor- tion by regimes of power, writing, ‘‘The new assumption behind the discussion of the body is that everything that we may observe
could be otherwise
.’’
8
Greer means two things by this claim. First, the signifi- cance we give to parts and forms of our bodies is precisely that, a significance given by us, not one that we find in our bodies via ‘‘objec- tive’’ observation. More radically, it is Greer’s contention that the very shape and form of our bodies is affected by gendered norms of behav- ior. Because girls and women are discouraged from undertaking vigor- ous exercise and weight training, they do not develop prominent mus-

1. Germaine Greer,
   The Female Eunuch
   and
   The Whole Woman;
   Judith Butler,
   Gender Trouble;
   Naomi Wolf,
   The Beauty Myth;
   Sandra Lee Bartky, ‘‘Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power’’; Bordo,
   Unbearable Weight;
   Andrea Dworkin,
   Woman Hating.
   

2. Bordo,
   Unbearable Weight,
   17.
   

3. Greer,
   Female Eunuch,
   17; emphasis in the original.
   

   cles. Because they are discouraged from expressing themselves through physical violence, they lack the strength and skill to do so, whether in attack or defense. Clothing and appearance norms have similar effects. As Greer argues:
   

   There have been great changes in the history of feminine al- lure in the approved posture of the shoulders, whether sloping or straight, drawn forward or back, and these have been bol- stered by dress and corseting, so that the delicate balance of bone on bone has been altered by the stress of muscles main- taining the artificial posture. . . . If I had been corseted at thir- teen, my rib-cage might have developed differently, and the downward pressure on my pelvis would have resulted in its widening. Nowadays, corseting is frowned upon, but many women would not dream of casting away the girdle that offers
   support
   and
   tummy control.
   9
   

   Greer’s claim is not merely that different ways of life have an effect on our bodies, but also that different social norms, different ideas about how men and women ought to behave, shape us physically. It is be- cause women’s bodies are shaped by the result of human, social factors that it is most appropriate to think of them as shaped by power. Wom- en’s bodies are shaped in these ways not as a neutral or undesired side effect of productive work (such as when a manual worker’s hands become rough or a computer operator suffers repetitive strain injury), but as a result of compliance with
   normative
   rules that directly dictate appearance. Women’s bodies are supposed to be distorted in these ways, and the distortions are valued in and of themselves.
   

   Similarly, Naomi Wolf argues that beauty norms dictate not just appearance but actions:
   

   The qualities that a given period calls beautiful in women are merely symbols of the female behavior that that period consid- ers desirable:
   The beauty myth is always actually prescribing be- havior and not appearance.
   Competition between women has been made part of the myth so that women will be divided from one another. Youth and (until recently) virginity have
   

4. Ibid., 36–37; emphasis in the original.
   

   been ‘‘beautiful’’ in women since they stand for experiential and sexual ignorance. Aging in women is unbeautiful since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be newly broken. . . . Most urgently, women’s identity must be premised upon our ‘‘beauty’’ so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive organ of self-esteem ex- posed to the air.
   10
   

   Again, we see the interplay between embodiment and power: social norms are transferred onto our bodies, and our bodies in their new forms act out these social norms, perpetuating them by example. It is this constant perpetuation of power at the micro, local level that Fou- cault wants to capture. As Foucault puts it in
   The History of Sexuality,
   power is omnipresent ‘‘not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.’’
   11
   Power, then, is not confined to those moments when an identifiable senior figure im- poses a formal requirement, but manifests itself every time there is any form of social interaction, be it interpersonal or between the indi- vidual and an objectified manifestation of culture. For example, the power of female appearance norms is not confined to the formal set- tings of the beauty pageant or modeling agency, but also manifests itself when women receive (and give) comments on their appearance, or when they observe others’ appearance and cast them as regulatory norms for themselves (‘‘The average person has [cosmetic surgery] to feel normal’’)
   12
   or when they observe images of ideal female forms on advertising billboards, on television, and in magazines or films. Each transmission of female appearance norms is an instance of power.
   

   The process by which we come to embody social norms of gendered behavior can also be understood in Foucauldian terms. Bartky shows how female appearance norms are enforced through a huge array of disciplinary practices a woman must master: dieting, exercises specifi- cally designed to create an appropriate female figure (such as the ‘‘Legs,
   

5. Wolf,
   Beauty Myth
   , 14; emphasis in the original.
   

6. Foucault,
   Will to Knowledge,
   93.
   

7. Lindsay Mullins, quoted in James Meek, ‘‘Prime Cuts.’’
   

   Bums and Tums’’ aerobic class), posture, deportment (such as sitting or moving so to preserve modesty when wearing a skirt, or looking away from a strange man in the street), skincare, hair removal, hair styling, and makeup.
   13
   These practices are disciplinary in that they dic- tate minutely and precisely how the body must move and appear, re- quire constant repetition, which makes them habitual, and are main- tained and enforced through (the threat of) surveillance. It is central to Foucault’s work that modern power does not come from a single, hierarchical source: power is not enforced by a conscious, dictating ruler. Instead, surveillance comes (and is perceived as coming) from all around: from schools (enforcing gendered uniform and appearance), parents (insisting that girls wear skirts and then telling them to sit in a ‘‘ladylike’’ position),
   14
   friends (comments on new outfits, makeup, weight loss or gain), the media (even broadsheet newspapers have makeup columns in their weekend magazines), the cosmetics compa- nies and so on, all of whom encourage or admonish women as regards their bodily form. At the extreme, this surveillance is formalized: beauty pageants award marks for adherence to minute and specific rules of appearance and bodily deportment. Bartky puts this point memorably: ‘‘In contemporary patriarchal culture, a panoptical male connoisseur resides within the consciousness of most women: they stand perpetually before his gaze and under his judgment.’’
   15
   

   Occasionally, advertisements prove to be explicit examples of this process. One such advertisement, for Clarks shoes and boots, bears the slogan ‘‘Life’s one long catwalk.’’
   16
   It depicts two women going about their everyday lives: one is refueling her car and the other is carrying plates as if waitressing. However, the women have been cut-and-pasted from these settings and placed into another: they are on a fashion cat- walk, and their footwear is being observed and judged by an array of fashion journalists. The suggestion is that women should always take care over their footwear since, even if they are merely engaging in mundane chores, they must imagine that they are under stylistic scru- tiny. A recent advertisement for Dove deodorant is an even more strik- ing example of panoptical advertising.
   17
   The product claims to moistur-
   

8. Bartky, ‘‘Foucault.’’
   

9. See, for example, Shere Hite,
   The Hite Report on the Family
   , 87–88.
   

10. Bartky, ‘‘Foucault.’’
    

11. ‘‘Life’s One Long Catwalk,’’
    Sunday Times,
    5 October 2003, ‘‘Style’’ Section, 21.
    

12. ‘‘So No-one Sees Your Underarms, Right?’’
    Marie Claire,
    November 2003, 246.
    

    ize and beautify armpits. In response to the putative objection that armpits are not subject to panoptical surveillance, the product was sup- ported by a series of advertisements showing women wearing sleeve- less tops and raising their arms to perform various work-related tasks, such as changing a lightbulb. The slogan challenges women: ‘‘So no- one sees your underarms, right?’’ Both advertisements alert their target audience—women—to the fact that their bodies are on constant show and subject to constant evaluation, and counsel them to take the neces- sary steps to prepare for this ubiquitous surveillance.
    

    Everyday rules of female appearance also illustrate the connection between power and pleasure. Women comply with appearance norms to an extent because doing so is, in myth and reality, pleasurable. The L’Oreal haircare products’ advertising slogan, ‘‘Because I’m worth it,’’ epitomizes this phenomenon. Although hair styling is tedious, repeti- tive, time-consuming, expensive, and prone to failure (think of the phrase ‘‘a bad hair day’’), L’Oreal’s message is that it is self-indulgent and luxurious to apply a set of products to your hair, wash them off with another set of products, and reapply them, day after day. Although high-heeled shoes are uncomfortable, difficult to walk in, and damag- ing to the skeleton, still women ‘‘treat themselves’’ to yet more pairs, salivating over the newest model. In an episode of the hugely popular comedy drama
    Sex and the City,
    the character of Miranda complains that walking to her new Brooklyn home from the subway station in her high heels hurts her feet. When her husband suggests that she carry her heels and wear sneakers for the walk, she sharply rejects the sug- gestion. ‘‘You can take me out of Manhattan, but you can’t take me out of my shoes,’’ she snaps.
    18
    

    If Miranda loves her shoes, then what is wrong with her wearing them? If in any case, on Foucault’s account, she could never avoid the capillary, all-encompassing reaches of power, on what basis could we condemn her high heels? How, indeed, could we distinguish between a person who follows a socially formed preference and one who is coerced to comply? Again, we see that free choice alone cannot be the arbiter of justice, for a Foucauldian analysis shows us that our choices are much less free than we think. We do not have to be acting under
    

13. Sex and the City,
    episode 91, season 6, ‘‘The Cold War,’’ HBO. All the show’s characters are devoted to their feet. Episode 83 of season 6 is even titled ‘‘A Woman’s Right to Shoes.’’ Sarah Jessica Parker, the actress who plays Carrie, shares her character’s love of crippling stiletto heels.
    

    the commands of a dictator to be acting in response to power. In our everyday lives, we encounter a host of factors that encourage us to act in certain ways, to form our bodies in certain ways, and to want certain things. High-heeled shoes aren’t inherently, naturally sexy. On a man, even one with feminine, slender legs, the general consensus is that they look ridiculous. The distortions they produce in the male body are not seen as attractive—even though they are the same distortions that are revered in a woman. The fact that we find high heels attractive on a woman is entirely dependent on how our society constructs beauty, and this, in turn, is strongly affected by our social norms of gendered behavior. Practices are contingent on the set of social norms (or power/ knowledge regime) they support and from which they derive.
    

    It does not follow that Miranda suffers from ‘‘false consciousness.’’ From a Foucauldian perspective, power is not transmitted primarily through ideology, through mistaken beliefs, but through practices that are self-validating: they have no external criteria of validation. Miran- da’s shoes
    are
    beautiful, that season in New York. But they would not be beautiful without the accompanying system of discipline and sur- veillance that contrives to make them beautiful, and without this sys- tem, there would be no reason at all for her to love high heels and every reason for her to dismiss them as ridiculous—just as men do for themselves.
    

    Without free choice or autonomy as a legitimating factor, then, we turn to equality. This move is discussed in much greater detail in Part Two. Briefly, however, the problem with disciplinary appearance norms is not just that they are different for men and women, and not just that they are more exacting and expensive (in both time and money) for women, but that their effect is to cast women as inferior. As Wolf argues in the extract quoted earlier, the ideal of youthfulness is a way of deriding female power and experience. High heels render women unable to walk or run easily. Moreover, compliance does not bring women power and respect, but rather ridicule from men who see women as being obsessed with trivia—sometimes expressed in the boredom or contempt which men may display when asked to comment on a new item of clothing, hairstyle, or waist size. Finally, beauty norms are impossible to achieve for most if not all women: most women could never be as thin or as flat-stomached as the models they try to emulate, no cream can prevent skin from becoming wrinkled, shampoo does not make hair permanently super-shiny and gravity-de-
    

    fying, breasts that are both large and pert are somewhat oxymoronic. Real women are not beautiful when compared with the standards ex- pected of them. And, as Greer puts it, ‘‘Every woman knows that, re- gardless of all other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beauti- ful.’’
    19
    The disciplinary power inherent in female appearance norms, then, contributes to and perpetuates women’s inequality in a way that is unjust.
    

    The main liberal objection to the Foucauldian account of power op- erating through internalization is not to deny that such a process can be identified, but to deny that it represents anything more pernicious than free choice—albeit under a set of social constraints within which all of us have to operate. If, as Foucault maintains, power is every- where, it loses its pejorative sense. If everything is power, there is no longer any distinction between a so-called free choice and a pleasure- endowed internalized norm; Foucault may refer to an action as the latter, but we might just as well refer to it as the former. It makes sense, so the criticism goes, to refer to acts that are not the product of conscious coercion by another individual as freely chosen because that reference distinguishes them from those which are. Differentiating the two enables us to see that the most important projects for a program of political liberty lie with identifiable, preventable, illegitimate con- straints. As Janet Radcliffe Richards puts it, ‘‘We may argue with per- fect justice that women are as they are because of social influences, but that is not enough to show that the choices they are making are not their own real choices.’’
    20
    

    It might seem tempting to caricature the debate between liberalism and theories of social construction as a debate of two extremes. Fou- cault’s claim that power is everywhere appears to entail that there is no such thing as a free choice or an autonomous subject, which would leave him no normative resources with which to condemn pernicious forms of power or domination, and no basis on which to distinguish influence from coercion. On the other hand, liberals appear to view all choices as free, autonomy as a matter of noninterference, and power as extremely limited in its effects, which leaves them with no normative resources to criticize choices that are the outcome of unjust influence. Neither caricature is entirely accurate. As I pointed out in the introduc-