Foucault,

Femininity and the

Modernization of
Patriarchal Power
By Sandra Lee Bartky
Michel Foucault
• Panopticon
• Docile Bodies
• Microphysics of power
A system of power that is
non-egalitarian and
asymmetrical
Body as medium of culture
There is a primacy of practice over belief is
not chiefly those ideology, but through
organization and regulation of time, space,
and movements of our daily lives. These
means make our bodies trained, shaped, and
“improved” with prevailing historical
selfhood, forms of desires, masculinity and
femininity.
“To overlook the forms of subjection that
engender the feminine body is to perpetuate
the silence and powerlessness of those upon
whom these disciplines have been imposed.”
(132)

We are born male and female, but mot

masculine or feminine.
Three categories of practices:

1. To produce a body of a certain size and

general configurations
2. To produce a body of a specific repertoire
of gestures, postures, and movements
3. Display of body as an ornamented surface
To produce a body of a certain size
and general configurations
Diet Disciplines
“Tyranny of Slenderness”
Exercise
Technologies of femininity

Not only the appetite but or contours of the

body but also the expression of the face.
Gestures, postures, and movements
Body as an ornamented surface
This is not however a simple sexual
difference, the feminine body-subject is
constructed as they produce a “practiced and
subjected” body, i.e. a body on which an
inferior status has been inscribed.
There is a measure of shame to woman’s sense
that the body she inhabits is deficient”: she
ought to take better care for herself; she might
after all have jogged that last mile.

The burden the poor women bear in this regard

is not merely psychological, since conformity to
the prevailing standards of bodily acceptability
is a known factor in economic mobility.
In a regime of institutionalized
heterosexuality woman must make herself
“object and prey” for the man.
1. Femininity as a spectacle is something in
which virtually every woman is required
to participate.
2. The criteria where we women are judged,
not only the inescapability of judgment
itself, reflects gross imbalances in the
social power of sexes.
Feminine bodily discipline appears natural and
voluntary. The panopticon is anywhere and
nowhere. Women become self-policing subjects
under patriarchy.

“rite of passage to adulthood, the adoption and

celebration of a particular aesthetic, a way of
announcing one’s economic status, a way to
triumph over other women in competition for
women or job, or opportunity for massive
narcissistic indulgence”
 Why aren’t all women feminists?
An adequate understanding of women’s
oppression will require an appreciation of the
extent to which not only women’s lives but their
very subjectivities are structured within an
ensemble of systematically duplicitous practices.

Tension between gender liberation and desire

for sexual pleasure
 Internalization
1. Modes of perceptions and self-
perceptions which allow a self to
distinguish itself both from other selves
and from which things are not selves.
2. The sense of oneself is tied to what one
knows, and what one knows how to do.
Feminism threatens women with a certain
deskilling. It calls into question that aspect of
personal identity which is tied to the
development of sense of competence.
A feminine body is in most cases crucial to a
woman’s sense of herself as female, as an
individual.
Deconstruct the categories of masculinity
and femininity as styles of the flesh by a
radical and as yet unimagined
transformation of the female body.
 #BeLikeMoss

Re-vision our own

bodies until we learn to
read the cultural
messages inscribed upon
them daily.
Wear the purple hair
And the big hoop earrings.
Wear the bright red scarf,
The one with the dangling beads and the
sequins
Wear the yellow pants
And the spike thigh high boots.
Whatever the hell
You want to wear, wear it well.
Take up all the space.
 What does it mean for men?
Toxic masculinity
“men are stupid”
“men are trash”
“all men are dirty and messy”
“boys don’t cry”
“men protect”
“men provide”
Boys must know how to respect girls and
women and what consent means. Just as
importantly, they need to know that it’s okay to
cry; that they too can be anything they want
when they grow up, even jobs traditionally
thought of as feminine, like a stay-at-home
parent, a teacher, or a nurse.