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Power, Resistance, and the Discursive Imperatives of Sexed Embodiment.
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Power, Resistance, and the Discursive Imperatives of Sexed Embodiment
In L’usage des plaisir, for example, he is careful to point our that despite its quite coercions, power is nevertheless at constant risk of at least partial fracture and breakdown. Because, modern power is a relation that is exercised from strategic positions and through strategic articulations rather than a univocal force that repress and prohibits, power generates within its own networks essential tensions and contradictions.
According to Foucault, modern power’s polymorphous techniques produce “innumerable points of confrontation, focuses of instability, each of which has its own risks of conflict, of struggles, and of an at least temporary inversion of the power relations.” Mining power’s points of weakness, contradiction, and breakdown enables one to turn power against itself; and it is precisely this subversion that in turn produces the possibility of resistance.
While Foucault makes clear in works such as L’usage des plaisirs that one can never get outside the “net” or “matrix” of power, he emphasizes the individual’s ability to subvert its strategic orientations and benefit from the unanticipated consequences yielded by such subversions.
To begin, one must concede that the fact of herculine’s hermaphroditism would have rendered any production of self (i.e., either female or male) extremely complex. Though deemed a female at birth, Herculine quickly realized that she was unlike most of her female peers.
These physical difference were an object of constant solicitude for Herculine, though this solicitude does not appear to have dashed what she continually describes as the most exquisite period of her life. It would appear that the convent, despite its disciplinary organization of power its admittedly patriarchal discourses of femininity, served as somewhat of a sanctuary for Barbin.
To understand how a Catholic boarding school for girls and a women’s teachers’ college could have served as an interstice of relative comfort for a young hermaphrodite living as a woman, one must first elucidate the relevant discourses that permeated the space in question.
the convent was saturated by the discourses of Western Christendom. These discourses defined “woman” in terms related primarily to her goodness of character, her willingness to attend to religious work, and her devotion to God and God’s “representatives.”
These discourses, however, did not necessarily consist in an extensive codification of the esthetics and behavioral patterns associated with legitimate femininity. If anything, these discourse were more preoccupied with denying female sexuality and corporeality than with elaborating them in any codified manner. Thus, all women-no matter how “unwomanly” they appeared-would be accepted in the convent as long as their service to God was deemed stalwart and sincere.
While the secular discourse of nineteenth-century society pertaining to “legitimate” femininity were by no means absent in the convent, they were, to a large extent, subordinated to those of Western Christendom. Because the discourses of Western Christendom were still highly invested in a disembodied spirituality, Herculine was enabled to elaborate herself as a legitimate servant of God and to live a life of relative peace because of that fact.
The convent and its Christian imperatives also functioned to exempt women from reproductive and familial responsibilities. This exemption was significant, as Herculine would have been unable to fulfill such responsibilities as a “woman” and likely would have been apprehended by the medical and legal authorities much earlier because of this inability.
Herculine was thus empowered to live as a legitimate and accepted woman in the convent precisely because there was a serious fissure in discursive organization of power. . .It is merely to say that that the somatophobic discourses of Western Christianity, discourses generally inderstood as repressive, actually functioned to make life liveable for an individual whose body would ultimately be deemed pathological in a secular context.
