An immodest proposal: Foucault, hysterization and the "second rape." (Michel Foucault)

There are many respects in which the social thought of Michel Foucault is a rich resource for feminist theory. Foucault's rejection of the notion of self-contained subjectivity provides a perspective from which to critique the idea that women's subjectivity is unusually and pathologically incoherent or unselfcontained. His argument that the production of knowledge regarding sexuality and the grounding of discursive subjectivity are two mutually supportive historical endeavors allows feminists to identify the cultural institutions that shape and define not only our sexual concepts but also our idea of what constitutes valid or empowering confession. Likewise, Foucault's inquiry into the practices that encourage or institutionalize specific forms of discourse reveals the performative criteria that distinguish an authoritative pronouncement from hysteria. Finally, his persistent claim that power/knowledge is always productive rather than merely oppressive allows feminists to theorize the link between lived, practiced embodiment and the body's social meaning, as well as to identify points at which the power invested in the identification/production of "women's" physiology might be reclaimed by the subjectivities that were formed as a result of this process.(1)

Considering these valuable insights, however, Foucault's own application of his theory of sexuality can seem unusually conservative from a feminist point of view (de Lauretis 1987, 36). One example to which a number of feminists have drawn attention is his now-notorious call for the "desexualization" of rape, made in a 1977 interview with the French journal Change.(2) His suggestion that rape law punish "just the violence" in rape, leaving the "sex" free of state interference, engages him with ongoing feminist debates regarding strategic legal and educational perspectives on sexual violence, but also implicitly suggests that rape law should protect the sexual expression of rapists before that of their victims. In fact, Foucault's theoretical work detailing the interdependence of coercion, discipline, and the production of truthful discourse in the exercise of state and social power provides the basis for a more thoughtful analysis of rape and rape law than the philosopher himself seems to grant in this case. Rather than separate the "sex" from the "violence," one might expect a Foucauldian analysis of rape to investigate the ways in which rape and rape trial process reinforce a discursive formation in which women are made to appear less coherent than the men from whom they are differentiated by their status as victims.

In a well-known critique of Foucault's comments during this dialogue, French feminist Monique Plaza argues that rape is sexual precisely insofar as it "opposes men and women . . . essentially because it rests on the very social difference between the sexes" (1981, 29). In this article, I would like to expand on Plaza's critique by exploring the way in which rape and the rape trial contribute to the deployment of sexuality by positioning women as "hysterical." According to Carol Smart, the rape trial "constructs a category of Woman as if it was a unity. The individual woman who has been raped is subsumed into this single category of Woman which is known to be capricious and mendacious" (1989, 42). My interest, therefore, is not in rape's status as an act of violence or an expression of physical power, but in its contribution to the realm of knowledge, its role in supporting a particular form of discourse and gendered subjectivity. How does rape "hysterize" women, both in the minds of men and in the minds of many assaulted women, by provoking and disciplining acts of confession?(3)

I. THE DESEXUALIZATION "STRATEGY"

In an issue of the collectif Change (1977a), Foucault discussed a number of proposed reforms in the laws pertaining to sexuality, which he had been asked to comment on by a commission for reform of the French penal code. Possible reforms included the reclassification of rape as a pure crime of violence rather than as a sexual offense. Superficially, the strategy resembled the demand of some North American feminists (such as Susan Brownmiller [1975]) that rape be reconsidered as a genuine assault rather than a sex act, with the connotations of pleasure involved in such an association. In the context of the Change discussion, however, the strategy was intended not to combat public assumptions regarding the essentially innocuous nature of rape but rather to challenge the disciplinary inscription of sex upon the social body as an omnipresent and dangerous text, one most intensely concentrated on and mediated through the bodies of official sex criminals. However, as Monique Plaza pointed out in her trenchant critique of the Change discussion (1981), such a "liberation" of sexuality from the context of punishment (unlike Brownmiller's proposal) would only be of practical benefit to men. Since women are the people most directly affected by rape (and rape law, by extension), it seems reckless at the very least for male theorists to choose rape law as the initial battleground for their counterdeployment of power/knowledge on behalf of an (apparently) genderless society. As Teresa de Lauretis explains in Technologies of Gender, "To speak against sexual penalization and repression, in our society, is to uphold the sexual oppression of women, or, better, to uphold the practices and institutions that produce 'woman' in terms of the sexual, and then oppression in terms of gender" (1987, 37).

It is important to acknowledge from the outset both Foucault's ambivalence regarding "desexualization" and the long-standing debate within the feminist community as to whether rape should be considered a crime of pure violence or a criminal expression of sexuality.(4) Although Foucault never really endorses the desexualization strategy, he never refutes it either, and even entertains the possibility of removing rape from criminal law altogether and making it a civil offense, to be punished by heavy fines. He acknowledges the female discussants' opposition to the desexualization of rope but remains unconvinced by their arguments as to why rape should be considered more than a form of physical violence; that is, why sexuality, as "located" in the sexual organs, should be "protected, surrounded, invested in any case with legislation that isn't that pertaining to the rest of the body" (1988a, 202). Alluding to the politics of sexologist Wilhelm Reich, with whom he had taken issue in The History of Sexuality (1978), Foucault observed:

One can always produce the theoretical discourse that amounts to saying: in any case, sexuality can in no circumstances be the object of punishment. And when one punishes rape one should be punishing physical violence and nothing but that. And to say that it is nothing more than an act of aggression: that there is no difference, in principle, between sticking one's fist into someone's face or one's penis into their sex. . . . But, to start with, I'm not at all sure that women would agree with this. (1988a, 200)