ABSTRACT
Foucault has offered a serious challenge to feminist analyses of western sexuality, particularly through his conceptions of the nature of the body and the nature of power.1 His work can be perplexing for feminists, partly because of the difficulty of grasping the different statements he makes about power, and what these might mean for women’s lives, and partly because feminism’s political strategies are based on conceptions of power and the body which are not wholly compatible with Foucault’s theory. They start from women’s experiences of being subordinated. Meaghan Morris argued some years ago that Foucault cannot be put to work for women because his writing is profoundly androcentric (Morris 1979:152). This male-centredness in his thinking has been well documented in more recent feminist analyses of his work (Fraser 1989; Braidotti 1991; Sawicki 1991), but nevertheless these and other feminists have found his work useful in bringing out problems in the way we think about the complexities of power.
