ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I take my lead from Foucault in several ways. I reflect about the history of recent feminist thought and of the power-knowledge relations developed therein. These reflections are in the fashion of a critical analysis in which, as Foucault described, ‘one tries to see how the different solutions to a problem have been constructed; but also how these different solutions result from a specific form of problematisation’ (Foucault 1991a:389). Like Foucault, I do not propose ‘a methodological examination in order to reject all possible solutions except for the one valid one’; rather, what follows is more in the spirit of his ‘order of “problematisation”—which is to say, the development of a domain of acts, practices, and thought that seem to me to pose problems for politics’ (Foucault 1991a: 384). So the spirit of the venture is itself Foucauldian. In addition, at the level of its explicit content the chapter considers how Foucault has influenced feminist thought and practice and how his ideas might be used to reflect on developments within feminism. Because of the limits of my own knowledge and experience, I shall be exploring this occasional partnership from within, and in the context of, Anglo-American feminism.
