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Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender and the Self Lois McNay Polity Press: Cambridge 1992, ISBN 0 7456 0939 2, £10.95 Pbk, ISBN0745609384, £39.50Hbk

Lois McNay provides here a wel­come, innovative and closely argued intervention in the debate on the re­lationship between feminism, post­modernism and Foucault which helps sharpen the focus of feminist theory by untangling the apparently contradictory impulses in Foucault's work.

McNay's argument has two major sets of concerns. She is cen­trally interested in Foucault's ac­count of the purchase of identity on politics and discusses how this might provide a resource for feminists struggling to reconcile women's dif­ferent experiences with a political commitment to the fundamental transformation of sex/gender power relations. This discussion meshes with a careful reinterpretation of Foucault's work which seeks to dis­tinguish it from postmodern theory.

For McNay, it is important that feminists grasp the shift which oc­curs between Foucault's earlier and later work in his conception of the individual. Where some writers and critics have seen inconsistencies be­tween Foucault's deployment of con­ceptions of autonomy, domination and freedom which would seem only to make sense within an Enlighten­ment frame of reference, and relativ­ist conceptions of power and truth largely derived from a Nietzschean tradition, McNay sees a developing process of self-critique which results in the production of an important, if problematic, conception of human agency. She argues that while Fou­cault's earlier work - most notably Discipline and Punish and The His­tory of Sexuality Volume 1 -operates with a notion of the individual as a docile body subject to the disciplin­ary movement of power, the later

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work - in particular The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self­represents an attempt to reinstate an active form of agency through the conceptions of practices and ethics of the self.

Foucault's non-essentialist con­ception of the body, supplemented with a notion of the self-determining individual can, MeN ay argues, pro­vide an important counter to two major problematic tendencies within feminism. It can challenge the image of women as passive victims fixed in a uniform relation to a monolithic patriarchal power structure, be­cause it can recognize the multiple determinations on women's re­alities. At another level the theory of the subject which emerges undercuts the essentializing assumptions of some feminist theory, particularly 'mothering theory' derived from the theory of object relations, which fails to engage with the historical and cultural determinations on differ­ence and sentimentalizes both mothering and sisterhood.

At the same time, MeN ay is concerned to rescue Foucault from the most intensely nihilistic im­pulses ofpostmodern thought and to relocate his project in an Enlighten­ment vision and its concerns with emancipatory politics. Foucault does not unconditionally celebrate differ­ence, but rather recognizes a need to sever moral concerns from theoreti­cal prescriptions, and to build a moral theory that proceeds from localized realities. If, like the post­modernists, he is suspicious of the normalizing force of meta-narra­tives, he does not thereby abandon the possibility of morality per se. His belief in the effectivity of critical thought and the coherence of emancipatory activity leads him to develop an ethics of the self which, unlike that of the postmodernists, 'always takes place in the space of coherent identity' (p. 135). The Fou­cauldian conception of the subject is, then, potentially more useful for feminism than the logic of endless

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dissipation or the apocalyptic vision of the schizophrenic as paradigmatic of the postmodern self. For McNay, Foucault is a theorist not of 'post­modernity' but of modernity's dark side, a Romanticist struggling with the question of how the individual might be self-determining in an era of the atrophy of meta-narratives and organized through technologies of power which function through regulating and prescribing the category of the individual itself.

Yet in crucial ways MeN ay finds Foucault's conception of the self wanting for feminism. His disinter­est in gender shows not only his sexism but also an insensitivity to the over-determination of social structure on individuals' struggles for freedom. His insistence on the positivity of power makes him in­attentive to the ambivalences, con­tradictions and enabling aspects of modernity. His ethics of the self is in the last analysis a form of aesthetics locked into introspection and left unanchored by his reluctance to articulate the normative under­pinnings of the Enlightenment con­ceptions he retains. Foucault, on MeN ay's reading, is not implicated in all the false dichotomies which have underpinned postmodernist analy­sis, but he lacks a developed account of the social embeddedness of the individual and so, at the end of the day, falls into the sterility of oppos­ing the individual to the social in a non-dialectical way. Habermas and Benhabib are discussed in some depth, to point to the necessity for a more dialogic conception of the inter­relation of self and other in which the other is conceived, not simply as that which the self confronts, but as a dynamic category built into the very process of self-transformation.

This is a book which will appeal primarily to an academic audience and to feminists who find engage­ment with philosophy clarifying for political vision. McNay's argument proceeds through detailed dis­cussions of the content of Foucault's work, his insights into the relation­ship between Greek and Christian conceptions of the self, and his at­tempts to develop a conception of power adequate to the complexities of the contemporary world. She pro­vides clear and illuminating dis­cussions of Foucault's critics as well as some of the most influential im­pulses within feminism. If MeN ay concludes that feminism cannot fin­ally dispense with general forms of explanation anchored in a concep­tion of justice, she nevertheless es­tablishes Foucault as an important figure in feminism's own dynamic interrelation with its own theoretical context.

Finally, a note of dissent. MeN ay comments at one point that Foucault does not attend to 'the in­voluntary and biological dimensions to sexuality' or to 'the emotional or affective side of sexual relations' (p. 80). From this point of view, Fou­cault's anti-essentialism might be seen as a theoretical problem rather than a resolution to the problems of theorizing the female subject, but this is a point which is glossed through the tendency to equate feminist essentialism with mother­ing theory. The problem of foun­dationalism, it would seem, persists. But that is to point to the need for a different debate.

Janet Ransom