ABSTRACT
Foucault’s relationship to feminism is a curious one, highlighted by the fact that, unlike Lacan and Lévi-Strauss, he never made the ‘woman question’ central to his enquiry. He invested instead in distancing the self from subjectivity marked and shaped by sexual identification. In an undisguised moralism which is central to his project, he argued that sexual identification should not be the foundation of the self; nor should sexual practices be the object of the exercise of authority and power, including the power to define, name and categorise. His writings are sympathetic to women, children and the ‘sexually deviant’ (all victims of oppressive and exclusionary exercises of power), but only to set up his argument that collective liberation requires rendering all markers of sex insignificant. In a late interview (Rabinow 1982:340-1) Foucault specifically denied the importance of sexuality, emphasising that this was not a contradiction, but an extension and affirmation of his earlier reduction of sexuality to discourse practices. Foucault provides an alternative parade, from ancient to early modern times, of other virtual formations of the self, analysing their accommodations with (or provision of obstacles against) pleasure and power.
