Foucault, in his History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, prefigures Judith Butler’s claim that gender is a performed insofar as he posits that gender is constructed.[1] He shows the overlapping interactions of bio-power with “a veritable ‘technology’ of sex” in his analysis of the judicial and political underpinnings of the category of (what he still terms) “sex” over the last three centuries.[2]
This poses a logical problem for those niches of contemporary gender theory which wish to defuse, rather than diffuse, power: Foucault’s theory regarding the inevitable coupling of power and pleasure invalidates some of the meanderings of certain bigoted thinkers. Both Foucault’s and Butler’s treatment of the social construction of gender exposes a particularly disawoved feature – that of power. Such disawoved libidinal investment then manifests in the social protocols which Mark Fisher identified with the “Vampire Castle”[3]: the fact that gender and sex (granted, Foucault did no really distinguish the two) are exposed as a form of technology, an architecture, of power, also exposes the complicity with power systems which enable the gender construct to persist and promulgate. Some of the hard-left initiatives can be seen a spastic and highly paradoxical call for mollifying power as such,[4]while resorting to invasive tactics which are passed over despite their cognitive dissonance.
There is good reason why Kimberlé Crenshaw’s widely circulated treatment of intersectionality is posited against the legal system of the USA, one where discrimination and systemic racism were integral dynamics of a fundamentally asymmetrical power relation. Crenshaw’s “Mapping the Margins” charts a gradated spectrum of intersectional oppression, but her idea of intersectional politics still retains the hierarchical progression of oppression with the white male apparatus filtering and sorting from the top. In Crenshaw’s intersectional theory, this zero degree of power relations is not that of a mere master slave dialectic, but the subject rather constitutes as a locus point of overlapping vectors inscribed within a legalist silex of power relations.
Outside of the syntax of the judicial structure, however, her model of intersectional oppression has been picked up within the incremental gradient of non-heteronormativity. Indeed, Donna Haraway’s cyborg subject is similarly cut up and determined through part-object interactions. But where for Haraway, intersectionality and assemblage is commensurate with pleasure, for Crenshaw it is a system of power. Both however constitute two sides of the same coin.
Foucault’s move from a “theory” of power to an “analytics” of power mirrors the dialectic present within 1990s feminist discourse between one which accepts the conspiratorial belief in an overdetermined “patriarchy,” versus one more finely tuned to understanding power as a mode of myriad overlapping, incremental systems. Power in Foucault’s treatment is thus not fetishized as centralized top-down hegemony, the likes of “big daddy mainframe,”[6]but rather a viscous network of polymorphous relations which are effected by power relations so minute that they bleed into what Keller Easterling calls the “chemistry of power.” Foucault precedes this argument when he writes that “technology of sex” is that of “polymorphous techniques of power”[7]which are dispersed within a matrix of “force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization.”[8]Power thus becomes a topology with its own neuralgic points of intensity.
Foucault again: “Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.”[9]
[1] Judith Butler in Gender Trouble, and Bodies That Matter
[2] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge (UK: Penguin, 1998) 90.
[3]Mark Fisher, “Exiting the Vampire Castle”https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle
[4]It is worthy note the similar alternation of materially saturated feminist eras and eras of inflamed conflict in Liou Sh-Chin’s Three Body Problem.
[5]Foucault, 45.
[6] VNS Matrix, “Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21stCentury,” http://www.sterneck.net/cyber/vns-matrix/index.php
[7]Foucault, 11.
[8]Foucault, 92.
[9]Foucault, 93.
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