ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Linda Alcoff's critiques of Foucault's treatment of the Jouy-Adam case, as well as recent critical engagements with Alcoff's interpretations by feminist philosophers Johanna Oksala and Shelley Tremain. In both The History of Sexuality and Abnormal, Foucault draws on a medicolegal report submitted on January 4, 1868, by Drs. Henry Bonnet and Jules Bulard, the head doctors of the Mareville insane asylum in the mid-nineteenth century. Feminist philosophers have extensively criticized the sections of The History of Sexuality and Abnormal where Foucault discusses the case of Charles Jouy and Sophie Adam. Alcoff's argument about "the phenomenology of sex itself" raises the important philosophical question of experience—a question that has been particularly significant to feminist engagements with Foucault's discussion of Charles Jouy. Oksala's and Tremain's critical engagements with Alcoff's writings on the Jouy-Adam case go some way toward salvaging some of the most controversial passages in Foucault's oeuvre for social justice scholars.
