BIDDY MARTIN "FEMINISM, CRITICISM AND FOUCAULT" (SYNOPSIS BY DEBRA PROVIDENCE)

Martin begins by outlining the dilemma that feminists and particularly Marxist feminists have faced in their theorizing: the problem of merging sexual politics with socialist politics. They are yet to satisfactorily align “the abstractions of patriarchy” (5) with the materialism of capitalism, without being accused of, as Heidi Hartman has, of being reductionist in their theorizing, suffering “the dynamics of patriarchy” as well as the “material effects of psychosexual conditions.” (5). While Hartman’s dual systems approach has been rejected by some Marxist feminists, who espouse instead a “single system that could explain a general intersection of sexual politics with the need for capital” (5), Martin sees weaknesses in both approaches. The weakness arises from the existing conceptions of patriarchy and capitalism where the power is seen as belonging to a “clearly identifiable sovereign group” (6), originating outside of or independent to the material social realities.

As s result subjectivity and sexuality become secondary manifestations of the oppressive power from above and freedom and liberation can only be achieved through dismantling this external power. This weakness pervades all Marxist feminists thought and Martin interrogates a Foucauldian approach to power (power originating from below or inside the body and not externally, and being a relationship between pleasures-knowledge-power as they are produced and deciphered) as perhaps being useful to tackling the problems faced by Marxist feminists. She does, however, apply the Foucauldian approach with caution.

Two things appeal to Martin. Firstly, Foucault’s examination of Marxists and Freudian approaches to sexual liberation questions whether those arguments of confession and openness as well as the non-existence of oppression, have not been themselves formulated within the “same discursive and strategic limitations” they would like to attack, making themselves new parts of the “operations of power in contemporary society” (9), to paraphrase systematizing and regulating desire towards a particular social or political end. Secondly, Martin finds appealing Foucault’s challenge to any “easy division between a dominant and essentially repressive discourse” (9) as well as the notion of “one oppositional, pure voice of liberation” (9). Power is multifarious in its forms and discursive fields and has no central point of origin and neither does resistance. Therefore, no “one” great revolutionary or singular approach to dismantling power is going to be effective.

Martin goes on to state how Foucault’s work converges with feminists’ interests, for example the limiting effects of institutionalized bodies of knowledge (medicine, psychiatry etc) on the female body. She also points out problems with certain feminist approaches to sexuality as equally limiting and to a certain degree essentialist, for example “the conception of a natural but repressed and inherently subversive female sexuality”(11), that pervades both European and American Literature as well as the depiction of male sexuality as “intrinsically aggressive”(11) emphasizing woman’s state as passive victim. While Martin acknowledges the political and historical importance of such approaches, she nevertheless sees a new essentialising ideology that is equally discursively limiting. Martin is therefore supportive of Foucault’s contention that the “‘real strength of the women’s liberation movement’” lies not in claiming the rights to their sexuality but departing from the “‘discourse conducted within the apparatus of sexuality’” (12) what Foucault calls desexualisation.

Martin now turns to the question of desexualisation and cultural criticism. Martin claims that feminist criticism must confront the many ways in which “phallocentric meanings and truths”(13) in culture have repressed difference and multiplicity by citing it as oppositional and subsuming it under the “Identity of Man”(13). In articulating a response to this repression, feminists must demonstrate an awareness of how discipline and power are constituted at the moment of the epistemological objectification of women. A Foucauldian approach, allows for interrogation of truth claims about sexuality and identity made in literary texts for example, revealing more of how a text attempts to “obscure its own political biases”(14), than shed any sort of light. By extension feminist critics ought to equally examine their own claims about women, as they do the men, to be certain that they do not construct a discourse of woman, that “subsume[s] difference and possibility under the conceptual and strategic grasp of a unitary identity of woman.”(14)

Excluding other forms of struggle for a privileging of one approach. For example, certain radical feminist thought essentially links women ontologically to nature and truth in attempts to counter distortions of women in certain masculine texts. The problem with this approach and others like it is that it claims the status of speaking for all women, univeralising its discourse whereas in reality it cannot make such a claim. Feminist criticism should guard against seeking out “ the authentic female voice or the sexuality”(15) but should rather seek to analyse the ways in which, “historically and discursively” woman has been “figured as a constitutive absence.” (16). This above all Martin claims is one of the greatest benefits of espousing some aspects of Foucauldian thought. But she also cautions against a full adaptation of such thought. Citing Leslie Stern’s critique of a Foucauldian approach of as steeping too far away from a critique of oppression or polemic (making it immaterial or abstract) as well as Monique Plaza’s polemical attack on Foucault's approach to rape and rape laws, (Foucault argues that rape should be seen as assault not a sexual crime), Martin concludes that to wholeheartedly adopt such a position of “abstract correctness, rather than grounding oneself within the limitations of one’s own material and ideological reality , is a privilege that can only reproduce the androcentric and fundamentally humanists universalizing “I”, this time in the appointment of  the “Not-I”” (17).

            Martin in her final analysis, states that feminists critique has often examined in their practice “authorial intentioanlity and classical notions of language” (18) critiquing on one hand sexist images in history and “exposing sexism in male texts on the level of manifest content” (18) while on the other hand creating the female canon through formulating an analysis of their texts that might unify their works. However despite their benefits, these approaches are limiting in that they assume within language and culture

a more or less authentic reflection of a preconceived reality or truth, and

[they assume] that women, by virtue of our powerlessness, can create new

meanings without simultaneously engaging in a careful analysis of the process

through which meanings are negotiated across various discursive practices at any

historical given moment. (18)

Martin suggest further that a

            materialist cultural interpretive practice insists that we read not only individual

                but literary histories and critical discourse as well, not as reflections of a truth

               or lie with respect to a pre-given, real but as instruments of the exercise of power

             as paradigmatic enactments of those struggles over meaning. (18)

Feminists should according to Martin, examine the many ways in which “sexual difference, the meaning of woman, figures in these processes by creating alternative points from which to approach traditionally accepted meanings.” (18), and states that feminism can in fact be a useful tool for pluralizing meaning by “opening apparently fixed constructs onto their social, economic and political determinacies.” (18)