Resisting Resistance: Against a Hegemonic Trend in Feminist Theory

Alison Convery
School of Economics, Politics and Tourism University of Newcastle

Refereed paper presented to the Australasian Political Studies Association Conference Monash University 24-26 September 2007

Resisting Resistance: Against a Hegemonic Trend in Feminist Theory

Abstract: This paper explores feminist discussions of resistance in the light of a dichotomy that has been installed in feminist theory between the object-victim and the subject-resister. In these discussions the terminology of the victim has been repudiated in favour of a willingness to celebrate all forms of resistance to patriarchal power, irrespective of the political efficacy of that resistance. The latter perspective is seen to represent a more optimistic and sophisticated stage of feminist analysis, which renders emphasis on womens victim status obsolete. In the context of this privileging of analyses of resistance, feminist applications of Foucaults theories are particularly revealing. This paper claims that the explanatory capacity Foucault is thought to offer feminists in their attempts to elucidate both the dissemination of power and the opportunities for resistance is overstated. Furthermore, this overstatement appears to be a function of the aforementioned dichotomisation of victimhood and resistance, and the valorisation of the latter. As a result, feminist theorists who draw on Foucault participate in the reification of precisely the kind of duality that poststructuralism seeks to dismantle.

Introduction This paper seeks to document the results of initial research into feminist theorisation of resistance, specifically in the context of what I (2006) have identified elsewhere as being a quite comprehensive repudiation by feminists of the language of victimisation. This repudiation replicated the terms of certain victim-blaming and anti-feminist discourses that circulated around the generation of the concept of political correctness in the early 1990s. Here I do not intend to retrace my earlier arguments at any length, other than to indicate the extent to which feminists appear to have accepted the terms of discourses that cast victims as psychologically flawed and lacking in agency. Recent feminist theory assumes for the most part, not only that focusing on womens victim position is strategically futile, but that shame attaches to the status of victim. The eschewal of the victim label in feminist theory appears to have found its counterpoint in an equally under-analysed celebration of resistance, irrespective of the political efficacy of this resistance what Abu-Lughod (1990) refers to as the romanticisation of resistance. In view of the low regard in which victim status has come to be held, this is perhaps not surprising. One would certainly not want to diminish womens attempts to struggle against subordination, however localised or contained these attempts might be. However, this paper asserts that this comprehensive endorsement of resistance must be examined in the light of the correspondingly blanket repudiation of the victim. Whilst it is worth honouring womens infinite willingness to wrest degrees of freedom within constraint, when resistance is reconsidered as one side of a self-imposed binary within feminist theory, the automatic cachet that resistance enjoys becomes more problematic. For instance, discussions of the value of various types of resistance may lack the critical scepticism required to gauge their utility for a feminist project, and the denigration of victims diverts attention from the task of identifying the multifarious ways in which women continue to be systemically constrained. In short, the underwriting of a dichotomy between passive victims (bad) and active resisters (good) hobbles the kind of nuanced debate that is necessary to formulate a robust feminist politics.

The romanticisation of resistance has gained added legitimacy from postmodern discourses that emphasise the possibilities of sometimes opportunistic responses to the localised manifestations of power, at the expense of strategic struggle against solidified, institutional power structures. In this respect, I consider feminist applications of Foucaults ideas about power and resistance, and question whether reluctance to interrogate Foucault more rigorously stems in part from feminists unadulterated approval of resistance in all its forms. In this case, what Martin refers to as our cordial treatment of the mens theories (Martin 1994, 651) is bolstered by feminist disenchantment with the victim. In turn, the mens theories confer authority on feminist faith in resistance, but also, by extension, on the distorting binary in which it participates. The aim of this paper is to position feminist theory as itself a discourse that is susceptible to the pressures of other discourses with which it will inevitably engage. Some of these discourses, such as those that construct and attack political correctness, are overtly hostile to feminism. Others, like postmodern discourses of resistance, are not, and are rightly perceived by feminists to offer fresh ways of thinking about their own emancipatory project. The incorporation and subsequent assimilation of competing discourses within feminist theory will produce a unique discursive system with its own characteristics and patterns. This is not to suggest that all of feminist discourse is derivative. However, it is to suggest that feminists be alert to the discursive imprints their theory potentially bears and to the particular discursive alignments that are at play under their auspices. In the phenomenon under consideration here, the adoption of discursive tropes that set passive victimhood against opportunity-rich resistance appears to have affected the way feminists frame their arguments and the sorts of questions they are willing to ask.

Victimhood and its Critics By way of setting the background for my present remarks, I will briefly recap the substance of my (2006) previous claims about feminist constructions of the victim. In these accounts the consciousness of victim status is not seen as the inevitable response to the reality of external, victimising circumstances, but is a function of a pathologised psychology. Women who adopt this psychology (and it is seen as something one takes on, like a cloak or a mantle) become paralysed by powerlessness and passivity. Indeed, passivity comes to be considered an inherent property of victim status, such that any agentic behaviour automatically disqualifies victim claims on the basis that agency indicates a capacity for resistance. Negative assumptions about victims are disseminated via a number of derogatory variants that position victim claims as exaggerated and groundless victimology, victimism, victimage and, most commonly, victimhood. Victimhood is static and monolithic, admitting of no other complexities of character or psychology. Marked by self-delusion and infantilisation, it is incompatible with whole personhood. The knowing, fully constituted subject is defined as having moved beyond the stage of the unwitting, underdeveloped victim. Labelling someone as a victim objectifies them there is no space within which to theorise the victim-subject who has an undeluded awareness of their victimisation. By virtue of their witlessness, victims are not in a position to prosecute the

legitimacy of their claims. A duality is installed passive/unknowing/object/victim and the active/knowing/subject/resister.

between

the

I do not mean to suggest that this refusal of the terminology of the victim has been the outcome of an identifiable debate amongst feminist theorists, of the kind that was undertaken around other potentially divisive issues like, say, pornography and sexuality. The adoption of this anti-victim orientation appears to have come about more as the result of a kind of subliminal absorption of certain assumptions about victims that were propagated by discourses that were hostile to feminism. One of the most prominent was deployed in the 1990s around the ideologically charged notion of political correctness, whereby conservatives mounted strong criticisms of claims of exclusion by minority and disadvantaged groups. In those attacks, feminists were cast as a particularly serious threat to traditional educational and cultural standards (Kimball 1990, 15). Around the same time, similar criticisms were more directly applied to feminist claims about womens victimisation in a series of books by a group alternately referred to as patriarchys prodigal daughters (Minnich 1998), media feminists (Atmore 1999), or anti-victim feminists (Cole 1999). In other words, this group was seen to set itself apart from what had hitherto been understood as feminist politics by its overt attacks on what it saw as contemporary feminisms exaggerated (and therefore unfounded) preoccupation with womens victim status. The general tone of these texts is one of deliberate ridicule, rather than one intended to open a dialogue, and for that reason their authors will herein be referred to as the prodigal daughters in contradistinction to feminists. The most prominent figures within this group are Christina Hoff Sommers (1994), Katie Roiphe (1993), Rene Denfeld (1995), Naomi Wolf (1993) and Camille Paglia (for a number of works, but see 1994 for a particularly vitriolic attack). Although most of these writers selfidentify as feminists, the extent to which it has been allowed that their analyses constitute legitimate feminist critique has depended on respondents views about the admissibility of drawing borders around what qualifies as proper feminism. In any case, their outsider status is not clearly delineated, since Wolf is considered to straddle such a hypothetical border (Atmore 1999, 186). Ironically, those who attacked victim claims repositioned themselves and those they purported to represent as the real victims, of either the progressive left (in the case of conservatives) or contemporary feminists (in the case of the prodigal daughters). They thus allowed that it is possible to occupy the victim position legitimately, and took their own claims to that position to be self-evident, whilst indicting other claimants with accusations of victimhood. In the prodigal daughters accounts, the grounds on which feminists have exposed womens oppression are progressively discredited - statistics on the incidence of sexual assault are questioned (Sommers 1994, 193, 210-11; Roiphe 1993, 52; Denfeld 1995, 59); rape is taken to be not paradigmatic of gender discrimination, but the activity of an (already) criminal fringe (Roiphe 1993, 52, 56; Denfeld 1995, 59; Sommers 1994, 220; Wolf 1993, 196-7); and there is a general scepticism in regard to the concepts of patriarchy and structural subordination (Denfeld 1995, 162; Roiphe 1993, 46-8; Sommers 1994, 16, 51; Wolf 1993, 149). What emerges as the source of womens experience of victimisation is paradoxically the feminist articulation of that victimisation. That is to say, feminists have supposedly brainwashed women into (mis)interpreting what 3

are simply unfortunate interactions between individuals as symptomatic of the dire state of gender relations. The position of victim thus emerges as a site of political contestation even while these writers attempt to depoliticise feminist claims and cast victimhood as a function of individual pathology. In virtually all of these representations, feminist legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon is taken to be the exemplar victim feminist. No attempt will be made here to give a thorough appraisal of MacKinnons arguments, but I do want to situate her within the victim debate as I will draw on her as a point of comparison a little later. To briefly summarise MacKinnons position, her central thesis is that the eroticisation of dominance and submission in all enactments of male/female sexual relations is the source from which all forms of female oppression flow (1983, 635; 1989, 316). Along with Andrea Dworkin, MacKinnon achieved a high profile in the 1980s with her formulation of an antipornography civil rights ordinance, which defined pornography as sex discrimination a systematic practice of exploitation and subordination based on sex that differentially harms and disadvantages women (Dworkin and MacKinnon 1988, 138). It was intended to provide a mechanism for women to claim damages from producers of pornography where it could be shown that they had been harmed by it. In one of the seminal attacks on political correctness, DSouza (1991, 173) holds her up as an example of an (inappropriately) politicised academy, referring to her as both a professor and a radical feminist, two attributes that obviously should not go together in DSouzas view! Likewise, the prodigal daughters are critical of what they consider her militant emphasis on womens victimisation at the expense of their agency (Sommers 1994, 231; Wolf 1993, 154). Both Roiphe (1993) and Denfeld (1995) devote a chapter to critiquing MacKinnons anti-pornography stance, on the basis that any kind of censorship is antithetical to feminist interests (Denfeld 1995, 91; Roiphe 1993, 153; see also Sommers 1994, 272; Wolf 1993, 116) and that it fosters a risky alignment with the extreme right (Denfeld 1995, 94; Roiphe 1993, 156). As I have pointed out, feminist theorists have taken on the predisposition to denigrate the victim that is associated with the afore-mentioned anti-feminist discourses. Likewise, they have replicated the habit of (negatively) portraying MacKinnon as the most prominent representative of the view of woman-as-victim (e.g. Cornell 1991, 11, 201; Brown, W. 1995, 94). Ruth Leys (1992) refers to MacKinnon as a [theorist] of womens victimage (197), and maintains that her point of view inevitably reinforces a politically retrograde stereotype of the female as a purely passive victim (168, emphasis added). These arguments typically consider focusing on womens victim status as an obsolete and suspect form of feminist engagement. Brown (1995, 94-5) positions MacKinnons hierarchical and dualistic view of power as a desperate attempt to resurrect the categories of modernity before their final usurpation by the more nuanced configurations of power associated with postmodern thinking. In a way, these views resonate with Paglias (1994, 108) opinion that MacKinnon locked onto Seventies-era feminism and never let go. There is a sense in which continuing to highlight oppression is seen as a kind of arrested development, of both the body of feminist theory, and of the women who are cast as, or think of themselves as, victims. The subtext is that feminists have moved beyond the articulation of oppression, have progressed to a more optimistic, but even more 4

importantly, more sophisticated level of analysis. Brown (1995, 94), for instance, presents herself as the wise interpreter of a historical dynamic, of which MacKinnon, seeking refuge as she supposedly is from the throes of a theoretical and political crisis, is ignorant. At this point, let me sketch in what is emerging in certain contexts as a further element of the duality I flagged earlier. To the victim end of the polarity, one can now append modern, and to the resister end, postmodern or poststructuralist. That is to say that hierarchical models of power, where power is conceptualised as a commodity that can be possessed, are seen to entail an essentialist notion of womens powerlessness that imputes a passivity to all women (Kerfoot and Knights 1994, 70). In an analysis of resistance that draws heavily on Foucault, Faith (1994, 55-6) considers the privileging of female-victim identity as one of the unintended early outcomes of second-wave feminist writing and activism (emphasis added). This might come as a surprise to second-wave activists for whom this privileging was seen as the mechanism by which the condition of women was to be politicised, but again, Faiths analysis adheres to the view according to which victims and their spokespersons are not quite self-aware. Faith posits female-victim identity as the antithesis of feminist resistance (55), partly by differentiating the ongoing, sometimes opportunistic, dynamic practice of resistance (39, 57) from the static nature of identity. Her valorisation of the former makes it impossible for her to consider secondwave focus on victim status as anything other than unintended, as it is inconceivable that what is now looked on with such disfavour should have been embraced as a conscious strategy. Because of the new possibilities for resistance that postmodernism is considered to expose, it is celebrated as an improvement on previously inadequate feminist theories (Weedon 1997, 131-2) in arguments that to some extent belie the anti-normative, antiteleological pretensions of postmodernism. Indeed Brown (1995, 116) admits in a footnote that she cannot quite dispense with the notion of progressive historiography. Ironically, feminists who utilise postmodern insights appear to be participating in the installation of precisely the kind of duality postmodernism seeks to dismantle. I will consider the application of postmodern theory to feminist discussions of resistance in more depth later, but let me turn now to some more general observations about recent feminist celebration of resistance.

The Romanticisation of Resistance The comprehensive denigration of victim status in feminist writing has found its counterweight in feminist celebration of the myriad ways women struggle against constraint, a celebration which often seems unconcerned with the political efficacy of this resistance. These struggles do not take the form of direct and strategic confrontations of structural power, but are rather subversive or transgressive, and engaged at the micro-level. Resistance is embedded (Mihelich and Storrs 2003, 405), buried in everyday activities (Weitz 2001, 667), and informal, often covert, and concerned largely with immediate, de facto gains (Scott, cited in Riessman 2000, 122). Resistant practices, however trivial, benefit from a degree of automatic legitimation which must be interpreted, I believe, in the 5

context of the low regard in which victim status has come to be held by feminist theory. All resistance appears to be equally valorised and the relative merits of different forms to be beyond interpretation. In an article on Bedouin womens resistance to practices of arranged marriage and sexual segregation, Lila Abu-Lughod (1990) refers to this indiscriminate privileging as the romanticisation of resistance. In the field of anthropology, it has been feminist ethnography that has been particularly influential in refocusing that field towards resistance (Brown, M. 1996, 729). This is perhaps not surprising considering the sensitivity that has developed in Western feminists to the imperialism of objectifying women in the developing world as victims of what the former interpret as objectionable cultural practices (MacLeod 1992, 534) objectifying both by presuming to name their experience, and because, as I have suggested, victims are considered to be by definition non-subjects. As I will go on to argue in a moment, this romanticisation is not confined to ethnographic study, but this field does provide particularly potent examples, given the perceived need to contextualise and nuance accounts of womens responses to presumed victimisation. Ironically, although Abu-Lughod flags this romanticisation as a potential problem, and admits that she herself has been guilty of the tendency to read all forms of resistance as signs of the ineffectiveness of systems of power (1990, 42), she nevertheless seems to invest resistance with more explanatory capacity than it is able to logically bear. Taking a cue from Foucault, she aims to use resistance as a diagnostic of power (1990, 42; emphasis in original), to infer power from resistance, a shift she claims will have serious analytical consequences (1990, 42) for the project of bringing to light power relations. In other words, this approach promises to uncover some knowledge about power that would not have been available otherwise. However, this perspective leads her to a number of circular arguments it seems resistance does not often tell her anything about power that she did not already know. In her analysis of the use of oral lyric poetry to subvert Bedouin moral codes that govern the social practice of inter-sex relations, she writes:
I argued that most peoples ordinary public responses are framed in terms of the code of honor and modesty. Through these responses they live and show themselves to be living up to the moral code. Poetry carries the sentiments that violate this code, the vulnerability to others that is ordinarily a sign of dishonorable lack of autonomy and the romantic love that is considered immoral and immodest. Since the moral code is one of the most important means of perpetuating the unequal structures of power, then violations of the code must be understood as ways of resisting the system and challenging the authority of those who represent and benefit from it. When examined for what it can tell us about power, this subversive discourse of poetry suggests that social domination also works at the level of constructing, delimiting, and giving meaning to personal emotions (1990, 47; emphasis added).

Here, Abu-Lughod frames her analysis around a pre-defined phenomenon designated a code i.e. a system of acceptable social behaviour that is inherently restrictive. It is only through this configuring of a code that those actions that fall outside its norms (here the intimate sharing of songs and poetry) can be defined as violations - which potentially invite a social penalty - rather than simply alternative ways of behaving. In turn, these violations can only be understood as resistance if they are interpreted as the outcome of experiencing 6

that code as oppressive. In other words, the conclusion she draws that social domination constructs and delimits personal emotions was already in place before, and actually enabled, her characterisation of the expression of these personal emotions as violations. Indeed, that causation seems to be made explicit in Abu-Lughods analysis. If social domination gives meaning to personal emotions, then interrogating these emotions for the meanings we can draw from them about that domination is tautological. In a later point, Abu-Lughod analyses the adoption by young Bedouin women of sexualised femininity (through the use of cosmetics and the wearing of lingerie) for what it can reveal about the operation of power, and concludes that this form of resistance may indicate the desperation with which their elders are trying to shore up the old forms of family-based authority which the moral code of sexual modesty and propriety supported (1990, 50). Yet this particular form of power (the social imposition of sexual modesty) has previously been identified via the womens resistant use of sexually irreverent discourse (1990, 45), and further evidence of resistance to it does not appear to elucidate its workings any further, other than via an assumption (which is not necessarily justified) that it is possible to infer the intensity of the application of power from the intensity of the resistance to it. A further problem is that a configuring of this move towards sexualisation primarily as resistance to Bedouin mores conceals its other function as the internalisation of other oppressive (non-Bedouin) norms of feminine beauty. Abu-Lughod seems to be alert to this these young women are becoming increasingly enmeshed in new sets of power relations of which they are scarcely aware (1990, 50). But Abu-Lughod is aware of these power relations (since she has drawn attention to them), and her awareness appears to include a pre-existing conception of cross-cultural patterns of female subordination that she has formed independently of analyses of particular manifestations of resistance to them. Her prescience in regard to these overarching and complicated power relations stands in contrast to the partial ignorance about power that she assumes as the starting point of her article, and which she sets out to relieve by using resistance as the decoder. To suggest that the way power operates should be inferred from the kinds of resistance offered to it carries the dangerous foreclosure of the possibility of formulating pre-emptive strategies that might render resistance less urgently necessary. A further obstacle to formulating strategies to counter undesired or oppressive power relations seems to be a general subscription to a non-hierarchical model of power, whereby systems of domination intersect and have locally specific effects (Abu-Lughod 1990, 52-3). This flattened model of power means that all forms of resistance come to be equally valorised, whether or not they have the capacity to transform even private, individual relations, let alone wider patterns. Abu-Lughod knows that resistance within the terms of one power system (traditional Bedouin codes of sexual propriety) might constitute subjection in another (a more global and consumer-driven form of feminine stereotyping). Indeed, if Abu-Lughod had strictly adhered to her methodology of taking resistance as her starting point, the extent to which resistant activities also function as subjection would be concealed. It is not, simply because Abu-Lughod (1990, 50) already has an appreciation of ways power over women is differently inflected, such that the same actions are oppositional in one context but not in another. Moreover, it is implied that the power system that constitutes the wearing of lingerie and cosmetics as not oppositional is the more pervasive, complex and harder to dislodge. Despite that, the project is not seen to be one of teasing out 7

the relative impacts of different manifestations of power and responses to them in such a way that certain forms of resistance might potentially be deemed strategically ineffective. In any case, the question of strategy is precluded by what amounts to a privileging of the private sphere as the appropriate site of resistance. Mihelich and Storrs (2003, 404) go so far as to say that conceptualising resistance as activities that happen in the public sphere is androcentric and narrow. The charge of androcentrism implies that, to be true to a feminist project, it is not merely a matter of expanding the definition of resistance to include private activities, but that these should be taken to be the preferred target of analysis. In Abu-Lughods (1990, 43) account, women protect the inviolability of this (separate) sphere where the defiances take place, and within which women keep secrets from men and cover for each other. To the extent that men are completely unaware of these activities, by virtue of secrecy and womens segregation, their status as defiant is questionable. There operates in these analyses a disconcerting (and unacknowledged) inversion of earlier feminist critiques of the private sphere as the site of the localised exercise of wider patterns of male domination that rendered private subordination politically significant. Those critiques were aimed at politicising private oppression with a view to changing social attitudes to, say, womens domestic role and sexual relations in marriage. In the inverted form, womens isolated efforts to negotiate or manipulate their private situation are configured as resistance without regard to whether cultural patterns of male domination are impacted or acknowledged in the process. Congruent with this focus on the private sphere, the potential impact of resistance is limited to family and immediate social relations, and both the transformative power of resistance and its capacity to even be interpreted as such (since it is rarely directly confrontational), are utterly contingent. In Abu-Lughods (1990, 44) account of the successful avoidance of an arranged marriage, success in that particular case depends firstly on the receptiveness of the girls father to her refusal, and secondly on his being able to formulate an excuse that allows him to save face with the man to whom he had promised his daughter. If there is nothing that necessitates acts of protest being socially interpreted as resistance, these protests run the risk of being considered merely as personal aberrations devoid of any political meaning (Weitz 2001, 684), or worse, co-opted. MacLeod (1992) analyses the recent trend for Muslim women in Cairo to choose to re-adopt the wearing of the veil as protest/protection against, amongst other things, unwanted sexual attention as they increase their participation in paid work. In this case, the form of protest is compromised by being already provided by a cultural view of women as sexually suspect and naturally bound to the home (1992, 552), and subsequent co-optation takes the form of the veil being enforced by husbands and religious leaders (1992, 556). To counter these risks, Riessman (2000, 131) suggests that it is important to distinguish resistance (transformative actions) from resilience (survival strategies). Weitz (2001) agrees that what constitutes resistance has been too broadly defined, and too readily valorised at the expense of highlighting continuing constraint. She concludes that it is necessary to narrow the definition to actions that not only reject subordination but do so by challenging the ideologies that support that subordination (2001, 670; emphasis in original). At this point, she has already accepted a definition of subordination as any ideas, practices, and systems that devalue one social group relative to another and place the first 8

group under the domination of the second (2001, 670). By Weitzs reading therefore, it seems that situating resistance entails a reconfiguration of power as hierarchical and arranged in such a way that the meaning and relative impact of manifestations of power and resistance can be evaluated depending on where they occur in the arrangement. Her definition also requires that, for action to qualify as resistance, it should ideally be engaged publicly at the level of the collective, and its motivation visible, especially to the powerful who are being challenged (Weitz 2001, 670). Weitzs thoughts about power and resistance emerge as part of her attempt to offer a new solution to a new problem (the loose definition of the latter). However, it is possible to read her solution as the recuperation of a modernist conception of power that has been disqualified along with the retreat from the discourse of the victim modernist by virtue of the kind of spatial metaphors associated with it, and because effective resistance to it is open and interpretable, not transgressive or subversive. It is notable is that even where writers are less automatically approving of resistance, there is nevertheless a greater willingness to theorise both forms of resistance and the resisting subject as more multifaceted than victimhood and victims are now allowed to be. In Riessmans (2000) study of the stigma faced by childless women in India, challenges to the social order ranged from resistant thinking to more overt and definitive forms of confrontation. In representations of victims, it has not been suggested that resistant thinking might be lurking behind apparent passivity - partly because the subjectivity of victims has been expunged in these constructions. Consequently, MacLeod (1992, 534) must differentiate victims (those accepting the inevitability of domination) from subjects of domination (emphasis added), who might exhibit a variety of responses to power that might include accommodating, ignoring and protesting, sometimes simultaneously. It must be emphasised that the quarrel here is not with feminist attempts to nuance accounts of womens responses to domination - indeed the identification of the need to do so underpins my suspicion of the process by which the victim has been extirpated from feminist discourse. One can agree with MacLeod (1992, 556) that theorists should avoid assuming a linear progression of consciousness from acquiescence to resistance to conscious protest, but one should nevertheless question why even that unsatisfactory linear progression is not allowed to include the perception of victimisation (somewhere between acquiescence and resistance?), wherein the very impetus for resistance must surely lie. At the conceptual level, MacLeod (1992, 534) admits the co-existence of victim status with resistance (women are both active subjects and subjects of domination). However, at the discursive level, victimhood is made to stand for passivity and the brute negation of subjectivity, superior (and in opposition) to which is deployed a complex and ambiguous agency (MacLeod 1992, 534). The language of accommodation has replaced that of victimisation to allow for a degree of agency in the ways women negotiate constraints. Here MacKinnons (1989, 326) discussion of these very sorts of accommodations is particularly relevant. For her, it was precisely the need to institute these coping mechanisms (Abu-Lughods (1990, 47) safety valves) that confirm womens victim status, not their infinite capacity for resistance.
Women often find ways to resist male supremacy and to expand their spheres of action. But they are never free of it. Women also embrace the standards of womens place in

this regime as our own to varying degrees and in varying voices as affirmation of identity and right to pleasure, in order to be loved and approved and paid, in order just to make it through another day. This, not inert passivity, is the meaning of being a victim.

Finally, let me recall a point I made earlier regarding Western feminist sensitivity to the objectification of Third World women as victims. The analyses cited above form part of a much-needed expansion of our understanding of womens responses to particular cultural pressures that are unfamiliar to Western women in these cases, Bedouin womens resistance to sexual repression and segregation (Abu-Lughod 1990), childless Indian womens deflection of stigma (Riessman 2000), and Egyptian Muslim womens negotiation of the demands of economic modernisation and traditional Islamic expectations (MacLeod 1992). However, both Abu-Lughod (1990, 47) and Riessman (2000, 131) caution against applying Western conceptual apparatuses to interpreting consciousness and motivation in a non-Western context. As Riessman points out, Western liberatory discourses may prompt us to read resistance into the stories of indigenous speakers when it is not appropriate to do so. I think it is true that, whilst earlier feminist theory neglected to contextualise the victimisation of Third World women, it is no less appropriative to cast their coping strategies in terms of resistance, when this may not be the intention behind these strategies. This is especially so when analyses of these strategies appeal to the Foucauldian model of power and resistance, as all of the above do. At this point, it is time to attend to the elephant in the room: Foucault.

The Foucault Factor It is not surprising that a theory that focuses so intently on power relations should be seen to provide fertile ground for feminists seeking to configure new possibilities of resistance to subordination. Indeed, feminists have appealed to Foucault more than to other postmodern thinkers (Bartkowski 1988, 51), despite some obvious tensions, such as Foucaults lack of attention to gender and the reliance on the concept of a fragmented subject that threatens the cohesion of womens experience. This section will address some preliminary observations about feminist applications of Foucault, and consider the explanatory adequacy of his approach (as presented therein) for attempts to highlight both the dissemination of power and the multiplicity of points of resistance enabled by that dissemination. It should be noted that it is not a question here of seeking to give a definitive reading of Foucault against which other interpretations will be measured. Rather the focus is on testing the logical coherence of accounts of Foucaults theory, especially in so far as these provide the rationale for elaborating power and resistance in certain ways. Despite a recognition that Foucault under-theorises resistance (everywhere present in the text but rarely discussed (Bartkowski 1988, 44; see also Howarth 2000, 83), there is a willingness to paper over Foucaults inadequacies in this regard where such indulgence is not extended to my point of reference, MacKinnon. The latter is deemed to present womens consciousness and the social world as so saturated with the effects of male domination that abstracting an emancipatory vision would be impossible (Allen 1998, 25;

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Brown, W. 1995, 92; Cornell 1991, 11, 131). Yet feminist theorists have not been averse to invoking Foucaults notion of docile bodies as a heuristic device to describe the disciplinary effects of precisely the sort of comprehensive colonisation of womens selfimage that MacKinnon appears to outline (e.g. Bartky 1990, 75). In MacKinnons work, patriarchal power is interpreted to be portrayed as at once suffused and monolithic, but the application of a Foucauldian framework allows the same patriarchal power to be configured as suffused but mesh-like and multi-faceted. It may be that the origins of resistance do not seem to be theorisable in MacKinnons framework (an entirely different argument that needs to be dealt with at some time), but equally it is doubtful that they are theorised any better in Foucaults writings. For both theorists, the subject is discursively constituted (though MacKinnon does not talk in these terms), the difference being that MacKinnon argues around a single pre-eminent discourse, whilst Foucault posits a multitude of intersecting and contradictory discursive systems. In both, uncertainty about the autonomy of the subject threatens to render the possibility of resistance theoretically incoherent. Nonetheless, the question of the autonomous subject remains unsettled in many feminist applications of Foucault, without this being seen to obstruct the analysis of resistance. In fact, the idea of the socially constructed subject happily coexists alongside explanations of the various choices of subject positions, forms of resistance and potential for self-transformation available to women, without this being flagged as a fundamental contradiction. For example, Weedon (1997, 121), in a book section devoted to Foucault, maintains that
Although the subject in poststructuralism is socially constructed in discursive practices, she none the less exists as a thinking, feeling subject and social agent, capable of resistance and innovations produced out of the clash between contradictory subject positions and practices. She is also a subject able to reflect upon the discursive relations which constitute her and the society in which she lives, and able to choose from the options available.

What she does not explain is what the nature of this thinking and reflection might be in the subject who does not appear to be detachable from its discursive constitution. Similarly Sawicki (1996, 169-70) concludes that the repudiation of the transcendent subject does not necessarily invalidate the notion of relatively autonomous subjects capable of resisting the particular forms of subjection that Foucault has identified in modern society, a statement that elides the question of whether relative autonomy is in fact a contradiction in terms. For Lloyd (1996, 247), as for Weedon, resistance is enabled precisely by the tensions created by the action of multiple discourses on the subject, which opens up interstitial possibilities for self-production. Yet, it is difficult to conceptualise the subject who occupies these interstices (between discourses?) as anything but in some sense therefore extra-discursive. In any event, Foucault (1980) seems to disallow such a possibility [i]t seems to me that power is always already there, that one is never outside it, that there are no margins for those who break with the system to gambol in (141), and further, he suspects that power is co-extensive with the social body; there are no spaces of primal liberty between the meshes of its network (142).

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Part of the attraction of Foucaults theory for feminists appears to be that the highlighting of the capillary action of power opens up a correspondingly large array of possible resistance points. It is also worth noting that if, as Hekman (cited in Ransom 1993, 135) says, that [i]n Foucaults conception the constituted subject is a subject that resists, there is a happy alignment between this conception and constructions of the subject-resister and object-victim that were being deployed independently in feminist theory. In view of the privileging of the former, it should be no surprise that Foucault is looked on with some favour. Invoking him in turn confers a degree of legitimacy on an already-established binary. Yet I find the explanatory power that Foucault is supposed to offer in this context is undermined by what appears to be a misapplication of his model of power. For instance, in Faiths (1994) attempt to elucidate elements of feminist activism using Foucauldian concepts she seems caught between a belief in the universalism of gender disparities (37) and a subscription to Foucaults idea that power relations take multiple forms (38). Likewise, she seems undecided as to whether women are always inside power, as Foucault says (37-8), or outside it, as they surely must be if they are to deconstruct power relations by transforming or reconstructing social values and institutions (47). Indeed, her adoption of the language of oppression and power abuse (39) might be paradoxical in the sense that, for Foucault, power just is. As Fraser (1989, 31) points out, Foucaults power is normatively neutral; it both constrains and enables, and on this basis, there is nothing inherently objectionable about it. Whilst Faiths essay abounds with examples of womens resistance to power at the capillary end, she is in no doubt about the nature of the supporting vascular system it is patriarchal power. In other words, the power that women confront in microscopic ways emanates from a central organising principle that gives meaning and coherence to its local manifestations. In this sense Faith assumes a concept of power that has more in common with the totalising model that Foucault rejects than with his configuration of power as circulating in ways whose logic is not immediately detectable. Indeed, Foucault (1980, 97) is interested in deflecting our attention from the possible connections between powers assumed origins and the extreme points of its exercise. Analysis should focus on the latter, at the point where power surmounts the rules of right which organise and delimit it and extends itself beyond them (96). It is not clear that Faiths appeal to Foucaults ideas has helped her to explicate the dissemination of patriarchal power and the local variations on resistance that it invites in ways that she could not have done otherwise, especially as she (1994, 39) imbues private acts with a political significance that assumes the connection between the personal and the political. In fact, Faith (39) herself refers to that second-wave feminist concept, which would appear to provide all the theoretical apparatus she requires.
Whether or not a response of counter-force to power abuse is planned and intentional, it is within this realm of the body that the personal becomes political and the individual becomes the collectivity [] It is especially within the realm of sex, the most private intimacy, that power is made most public and resistance most socially engaged.

Faith posits a variety of different types of resistance, ranging from visceral, primitive act[s] of survival (39) to a strategic play of forces (39), though I am not sure how the visceral and primitive might be situated in Foucaults theory, given its premise of the discursively constituted subject. While Faith enlists Foucault to support her analysis of

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resistance, the assumptions she makes here about the specifics of resistance are not necessarily underwritten by Foucault. If resistance can be primitive or strategic, this raises questions about how Faith might understand the precise nature of the reciprocity of power and resistance in Foucaults work. Is resistance always instantaneous? Is its reach perfectly commensurate with that of the power to which it is responding? If the answer to either of these questions is negative, how might one theorise the subject who bears the imprint of power but has not offered immediate or adequate resistance, without recourse perhaps to the terminology of the victim? Indeed, Faith (39) does make such recourse when she describes the willing victim, who strategically withholds resistance until a more potent challenge can be mounted [t]he subject may know the experience of being in charge even as she is liable to the disciplines which claim her subjection. It is ironic that it is under the auspices of Foucault that the space is created to reinsert the concept of the victim, especially as this (active and knowing) victim is imbued with a complexity that is not allowed elsewhere.

Conclusion My intention in this paper has been to treat feminist theory as itself a discourse, and I have sought to explore the dynamics of its intersection with other discursive systems which, intentionally or otherwise, do not privilege gender as a crucial nexus of power relations. As Atmore (1999, 190) notes, the overlapping of discourses can mean that traces of similar rhetoric can be detected in opposing systems. In line with her recommendation, I have attempted to deconstruct feminist narratives of resistance (and by implication, of victimhood) by using contradictions and gaps in logic to read against the obvious story of the text for what other interpretations might be made of it [] (1999, 190). This has been done in an effort to unpack a particular trajectory in feminist theory the installation of a dichotomy that has fostered certain directions of argument and suppressed others. From a poststructuralist perspective, resistance becomes a process of recuperating subjugated knowledges, of points of view that are disqualified by dominant discourses (Faith 1994, 38). I have demonstrated that feminist discourse has instituted such a disqualification by establishing within its own terms the resisting agent as a preferred subject position and expunging the victim. According to Weedon (1997, 106), the establishment of preferred and non-preferred subject positions in a particular discourse enables the latter to become a focus of reverse discourse, whereby it is redefined and reprivileged. Bearing in mind that the position of victim was being discredited in overtly anti-feminist discourses (those constructing the idea of political correctness as a means to counter progressive politics), the appropriate resistance to mount on Weedons reading would be to contest the terms in which victims were being defined in those discourses, rather than to adopt a similarly denigrating posture. However, it is also worth noting that the victim subject position is configured in a more complicated way in the aforementioned conservative discourses - as in a sense, both 13

preferred and non-preferred by virtue of claims of reverse victimisation at the hands of the so-called PC thought police. Foucault, at least, does not appear to provide the theoretical resources that would elucidate strategies for negotiating such a situation, since resistance in his terms (at least as formulated by his feminist interpreters) is understood to be a matter of choosing a subject position, or constituting the self in ways that run counter to the dominant construction of subjectivity (e.g. Ransom 1993, 134). In that scenario, choice is necessarily limited but it is not obstructed. In debates discursively organised around the trope of political correctness, however, the victim subject position became the site of a struggle over occupation, over legitimate and exclusive rights to occupy that position. This struggle entailed questions about relative harms, with each side claiming to be acted upon by the power of the opposing side, and simultaneously denying that it itself was exercising any power. On the feminist side, the argument recast as victimising practices that had previously been normalised i.e. it aimed to expose the exercise of power where this had been concealed. To argue in this way would be tautological in Foucaults terms the subject cannot be without being acted upon by power. Hence, the exercise of power ceases to be political in the sense that there is no argument to be had about its existence or legitimacy. To position resistance as the antidote to victimhood, especially when this resistance is discussed in Foucauldian terms, elides questions of relative power which were central to the evaluation of victim claims. By focusing on feminist discussions of resistance (and victimhood), I have highlighted the extent to which feminist theory operates at the nexus between other ostensibly unrelated discourses. Atmore (1999, 200-201) draws attention to the way MacKinnon has been misread by both postmodern feminists and prodigal daughters alike, and urges further investigation as to why this might be the case. Taking up that challenge, I have argued that this misreading is connected to the dichotomisation of victimhood and resistance, to the moral inferiority that attaches to victims and the corresponding reactionary valorisation of resistance. As Bakhtin (1981, 272) points out, each language participates in a dialogized heteroglossia that threatens its unity, and this participation determines the linguistic profile and style of the utterance. I would not hazard a conclusion as to how this discursive complexity should be negotiated. But I have examined certain lines of argument in feminist theory in such a way that aspects of its linguistic profile might emerge.

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