ABSTRACT
In Chapter 5, I examined the historical formation of the concept of the individual self, and how this intersected with systems of sexual difference, looking at the way cultural subjectivity became defined and read in culturally specific styles of living, habits, taste and feeling. This showed that our contemporary notions of subjectivity developed in association with a particular form of social organisation consolidated from the end of the eighteenth century – that which aligned femininity with private life and masculinity with the public world of the citizen. The concepts of subjectivity that are articulated in these everyday cultures, however, are also produced in texts which circulate within particular institutional contexts: as such, they endow certain definitions of social and sexual difference with a particular authority through their association with the validated disciplines of knowledge. It is these disciplines – including medicine, the law and the social sciences, among others – which are deployed in the government of populations, and which develop definitions of the gendered individual as a way of making this population knowable and hence manageable. You will remember Chartier’s argument that representations ‘order’ and ‘classify’ reality, and that to understand how this process of ordering occurs, we have also to examine the ways that they become ‘anchored’ to the social practices and institutions which adopt their systems of order and classification. Representations and their systems of intellectual ordering, in other words, are part of a larger system of social ordering, in which conceptual frameworks and definitions are put into play and have material effects.
