Woman, as Beauvoir depicts her, is not just man's Other, she is his inferior Other: "The relation of the two sexes is not like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, so that in French [as in English] one says "men" to designate human beings . . . He is the Subject, he is the Absolute she is the Other" (TSS xxi). Whereas Sartre argues that by returning the look one can always turn the tables on the Other, Beauvoir suggests that what distinguishes the situation of woman is precisely her inability to do so. "No subject," she observes, "immediately and voluntarily affirms itself as the inessential," thus the question is "from whence comes this submission in women?" (TSS xxiv).
In answering this question Beauvoir offers us a series of descriptions of how women come to exist in the mode of inferiority and to subsume it into forms of subjectified feminine subjectivity. If "not every female human being is necessarily a woman" (TSS xix), then we need to grasp the processes through which "one becomes one" as not only the exercise of power upon and its transmission through the subject, but also as it is interiorized, taken up, and lived. It is here that the panopticisms of daily life and the "interior" experiences of shame they induce are crucial.
Beauvoir begins by describing the multitude of small disciplines to which female children are often subjected and which still today induce passivity, timidity, and physical self-constraint.[10] But she suggests that it at puberty that more profound experiences of shame usually begin. At that time, a girl often becomes the object of stares, whistles, derogatory remarks on the street (and at school in coeducational systems) and, simultaneously, is required to hide from view the newly acquired "secret" of menstruation. In the experience of menstruation (at least in Western society) a young woman's profound sense of herself as not only the Other but as the inferior Other is dramatically discovered. She must ensure that she does not appear soiled in public; must learn discreetly to dispose of bloodied pads, tampons and clothing; is warned that she might give away her "condition" by the smell of menstrual blood should she not keep herself sufficiently clean.[11]
In such ways, a young woman learns how to develop those practices of self-surveillance and self-discipline that Foucault attributes to the panoptic gaze. But they are not the direct effect of the gaze itself, so much as of the shame with which it forces her to see "herself." Shame, as what we might call a primary structure of a woman's lived experience, extends far beyond her relationship to menstruation, and it becomes integral to a generalized sense of inferiority of the feminine body-subject. A woman, Beauvoir writes, "is her body; but her body is something other than herself" (TSS 29).
As Beauvoir's account of women's lived experience proceeds, from early childhood, through girlhood, sexual initiation, marriage, childbirth, and motherhood, toward old-age, shame remains a primary structure of experience. Shame of an embodied self that is always marked as inferior, as defective, is instrumental to women's participation in the multitude of minute daily practices that induce docility and reproduce forms of normalized feminine behavior.[12] Nor does the woman who resists, the would-be "independent" woman whom Beauvoir describes in the final section of The Second Sex, escape from it.
On the contrary, Beauvoir points out, the would-be independent woman lives her femininity as a painful contradiction. Brought up (as most girls still are today) to see herself through the male gaze, enjoined to passivity, and to make herself desirable to man, she is her femininity. Her being-for-others is profoundly gendered. This is not a facticity that can be ignored, since it thoroughly permeates her being-for-herself. She cannot renounce her femininity, for it is constitutive of her selfhood even as it undercuts her struggle for self-affirmation. The "independent" woman thus lives divided against herself even more starkly than the woman who more fully accepts traditional feminine roles.[13]
Moreover, because Woman is not merely man's Other, but an inferior Other, Beauvoir is keenly aware that individual solutions are not fully realizable. This is not to say that individual women should cease to mount a personal challenge to normalizing femininity. But in challenging it they will disclose the radical inequality of their situation and encounter the limits to what can be individually achieved. Beauvoir is far from affirming the untrammelled capacity for freedom, or "transcendence," of which she is often accused. On the contrary, she would agree with Foucault that it is through subjection to disciplinary and normalizing practices that subjectivity comes into being. The feminine subject cannot simply shed her femininity, for there is no "inner" subject that can, in absolute freedom, transcend its body and its situation; there is no pure constituting consciousness. But to acknowledge this is not to deny all freedom to the subject. For most women, a range of choices are still open as to how one interiorizes, assumes, and lives normalized femininity. Thus, issues of personal agency, ethics, and responsibility, that cannot consistently be posed within Foucault's explicit framework, emerge as central for Beauvoir.
Beauvoir posits a continuum of situations. At one end of the continuum, she offers an account of the subject that could be re-cast in Foucault's starkest terms. She talks of the woman who lives in a situation of such extreme subjection that freedom is made immanent, is no more than a suppressed potentiality. Here a woman is so thoroughly her situation, so thoroughly its product, that no effective choice as to how it is to be lived is possible. Such a woman is, as Foucault had put it, a constituted, not a constituting subject (1980: 117).
But while immanence marks one end of a continuum of theoretically possible situations, it is doubtful if many women actually live in such a condition. At the other end of the continuum is the "independent" woman, who struggles doggedly against the constraints of her situation and in so doing reveals the impossibility of fully transcending it. Most women, however, live neither in total immanence nor in a mode of continuous revolt. They live somewhere between, embracing various modes of complicity, compromise, or resistance, each of which has both rewards and costs attached to them. Here we return, with Beauvoir, to those issues of complicity with subjection; and to those questions of individual resistance that Foucault's account of subjectification tacitly poses but does not adequately address.
*****
Near the end of The Second Sex Beauvoir observes that men find in women "more complicity than the oppressor usually finds in the oppressed" (TSS 721). The term "complicity" for Beauvoir connotes a moral register, absent in Foucault's account of the subject's "compliance" in disciplinary power. What both Beauvoir and Foucault share is the insight that the subject of disciplinary power actively participates in it: power is not unidirectional, nor simply top-down. We have already seen that Beauvoir accounts more fully than Foucault for how, through self-objectification and shame, disciplinary power is internalized so that its subject comes also to be its agent. But, beyond the 'how,' there are also questions of 'why.' For Beauvoir also suggests that in many instances complicity could be more fully resisted. The subjectified subject, which takes up those practices of power through which it is both constituted and self-constituting, still enjoys a degree of freedom as to how it assumes them. Here, ethical issues begin to arise: for if the subject enjoys a degree of freedom, complicity is not just a fact to be described, but a choice, a project, that is open to moral evaluation. It is a matter of what, following Sartre, Beauvoir will call "bad faith," "flight," or the choice of "inauthenticity."
After decades of popular self-help manuals, the term "authenticity" often connotes today a highly psychologized notion of the search for "inner meaning" or the quest to get in contact with one's "real self." But for Beauvoir as for Foucault there is no real or inner self "there" to be discovered. Rather, what is at issue here is the choice of an ethical stance in the face of one's situation and its facticities. In inauthenticity, a woman affirms her selfhood to be constituted by exterior conditions and forces even when this is not wholly the case. The "bad faith," or self-deception, lies in the fact that one is still making choices and exercising a degree of freedom, while claiming to be unable to do so. For (very rare circumstances apart), one is not free not to choose how one takes up one's situation. To "become a woman" is not to be sculpted by exterior forces like a lump of clay. To claim an analogously inert status, to claim that one is "constituted" through and through, is in bad faith to flee one's freedom.[14] Beauvoir thus insists that, however constrained our situation, we can almost always still take it up in different ways, and that we must accept responsibility for our own choices and values.
Today, few Western women fit the details of Beauvoir's outdated portrait of the inauthentic housewife in The Second Sex. Yet surprisingly many of her insights remain pertinent. Self-abnegation and denial; deference to the opinions of others and failure to assert one's own; limiting one's goals and ambitions, particularly to fit in with those of a lover or husband or child: all of these typically "feminine" forms of behavior still endure among a diverse range of women today. They can, of course, often be explained as rational, even self-interested, strategies on the part of those who are still, to a significant degree, economically dependent on men. In Foucauldean vein, one can also account for them as strictly the effects of those disciplinary and normalizing practices through which women are constituted as subjects. But if neither explanation is wrong, neither is by itself adequate. For "feminine" behavior is more than either a calculated strategy or a discursively produced effect. It is more than a strategy because being a woman is not an identity that an "inner" self could pick up or shed at will. It is more than a discursive effect because it is interiorized and taken up in ways that are both constrained and yet still indeterminate, and open to moral evaluation.
It is from this indeterminacy that feminism, as a political project, begins. It must start by recognizing the existence of that margin of freedom that enables us to struggle against our complicity in subordinating and subjectifying practices as well, of course, as to struggle against the institutional dimensions of subordination, such as legal lack of control over our own bodies, or unequal pay. Beauvoir's message is clear: feminism must not be shy to affirm its values, for any emancipatory project implies an ethical stance. And, indeed, given even the smallest margin of freedom, we cannot avoid affirming values in all that we do. To deny this is to act in bad faith, and lay claim to an irresponsibility we do not enjoy.
It is also true, of course, that no emancipatory project is entirely innocent. As Foucault has so clearly pointed out, all claims to truth, or affirmations of values, are also productive of power effects. However, this does not mean that we should endeavor not to affirm our own values lest, in the name of truth, we become yet further complicit with power.[15] On the contrary, the better safeguard is to make explicit the values implied by our actions, while also recognizing our responsibility for the power effects they produce.
Thus to write, with Foucault, "to have no face," to insist that there are not authors (be it of texts or of deeds), to attribute to disciplinary practices their own purposes and intentionality, and to claim that each of us is equally constituted by a power that none possesses, amounts finally to a flight into the self-delusional and irresponsible world of bad faith. To conclude, Foucault offers us a new version of "the temptation to flee freedom and constitute oneself a thing" (TSS xxvii) a temptation we should resist, even as we continue to draw on his rich insights into the operations of power and subjectification.
References
Bartky, Sandra. 1990. Femininity and Domination. New York: Routledge.
Beauvoir, Simone de. [1947] 1967. The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: The Citadel Press. Originally published as Pour une morale de l'ambiguοtι. Paris: Gallimard.
. [1949] 1989. The Second Sex. Trans. H.M. Parshley. Preface by Deidre Bair. New York, Vintage Books. Originally published as Le deuxiθme sexe. Paris: Gallimard. Original English edition, New York: Knopf, 1952.
Bordo, Susan. 1993. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Butler, Judith. 1997. The Pyschic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Dumm, Thomas. 1996. Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom. Thoudand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Fanon, Frantz. [1952] 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markham. New York: Grove Weidenfeld.
Foucault, Michel. [1969] 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock Publications.
. [1954] 1976. Mental Illness and Psychology. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Harper Colophon Books.
. [1975] 1977a. Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin Books.
. 1977b. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books.
-. [1979] 1984. "What is an Author?" In The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, 101-20. New York: Pantheon Books.
. [1983] 1988. "Critical Theory/Intellectual History." In Michel Foucault. Politics Philosophy Culture. Interviews and Other Writings 1977-84, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, 17-64. New York: Routledge.
Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Hartsock, Nancy. 1996. "Community/Sexuality/Gender: Rethinking Power." In Revisioning the Political, ed. Nancy Hirschmann and Christine DiStefano, 27-49. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Kruks, Sonia. 1990. Situation and Human Existence: Freedom, Subjectivity and Society. New York and London: Routledge.
__________. 1996. "Fanon, Sartre, and Identity Politics." In Fanon: A Critical Reader, ed. Lewis R. Gordon et al., 122-133. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Miller, James. 1993. The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. [1943] 1956. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: New Philosophical Library. Originally published as L'Etre et le nιant. Paris: Gallimard.
Young, Iris M. 1990. Throwing like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
NOTES
[1]. I use this term somewhat reluctantly since it can cover such a diversity of positions. However, it does connote an intellectual style and a cluster of loosly shared assumptions and, given also its extensive utilization within feminist (and other social) theory, it seems necessary to employ it.
[2]. The most sustained attempt to date to extract a theory of freedom from Foucault is perhaps Dumm's. Dumm makes a strong case that Foucault effectively challenges the "liberal" notion of the "democratic individual" as "the exclusive site of freedom" (1996: 5). However, his work does not explore issues of freedom raised by an alternative conception of the self, such as Beauvoir's, that does not neatly correspond with the liberal model.
[3]. Moreover the embarrassing evidence of Foucault's own youthful embrace of phenomenology has to be deliberately expunged from the author's presentation of his "work." Thus, in an interview published as late as 1983 (the year prior to his death) Foucault referred to Madness and Civilization as his "first" book ([1983] 1988: 23). In doing so this man, who claimed he wrote "to have no face" ([1969] 1972: 17), deliberately (mis)presented his "work" so as to exclude from it his earliest, and still phenomenologically-influenced, book Mental Illness and Psychology ([1954] 1976).
[4]. Thus James Miller observes, in the Preface to his account of Foucault's life and work, that (perhaps contra Foucault himself) "I was forced to ascribe to Foucault a persistent and purposeful self, inhabiting one and the same body throughout his mortal life, more or less consistently accounting for his actions and attitudes to others as well as himself, and understanding his life as a teleologically structured quest" (Miller 1993: 7).
[5]. The English translator of The Second Sex, H.M.Parshley, has unfortunately translated Beauvoir's chapter heading, "Formation," as "The Formative Years," thus weakening the notion of an active production of the self implied by the French term.
[6]. These relationships may sometimes give rise to the quite explicit interests that certain women have in complying with the norms of femininity. For example, for a dependent or low-earning housewife, the economic costs of a broken marriage that might result from resistant behavior can be catastrophic. Likewise, the refusal docilely to submit to forms of sexual harassment by a male superior at work can jeopardize many a woman's career. In some instances, contra Foucault, we may reasonably posit a woman as an interest-maximizing agent, in order to account for her complicity in her own continued personal subordination.
[7]. It is, I think, this omission that Nancy Hartsock has in mind when she observes (following Edward Said) that Foucault is "with power" rather than against it (1996: 36).
[8]. The French, "le regard," has conventionally been rendered as "the look" in Sartre translations and scholarship, and as "the gaze" in the case of Foucault. While the two terms carry different resonances in English, these are the function of translation processes, and would not be present for French readers.
[9]. Frantz Fanon also powerfully developed Sartre's account of shame, to explore the lived experiences of black embodiment in a predominantly white society ([1952] 1967). I discuss Fanon's relationship to Sartre more fully in Kruks 1996.
[10]. Although girls from most social strata in the USA today are less constrained than were the middle class women of Beauvoir's France, Beauvoir's observations generally still appear to hold. Iris Young has discussed a range of studies that show that girls (and women) still fail to extend their bodies, or to occupy space as fully as boys do; they throw, sit, walk, and carry things in typically timid and constricted "feminine" modalities. Young suggests that these are not merely different from masculine modalities, but are indicative of women's oppression: "Women in sexist society are physically handicapped. Insofar as we learn to live out our existence in accordance with the definition that patriarchal culture assigns to us, we are physically inhibited, confined, positioned, and objectified" (Young 1990: 153).
[11]. An astounding number of products are aggressively marketed today that promise women "protection" against the dread embarrassments of leaks and odors. Deodorant tampons, special cleansers, and other such products abound on supermarket shelves and are heavily advertized.
[12]. The content of normalized femininity has, of course, shifted dramatically since Beauvoir's time, especially in the USA. But normalizing demands are no less intense today. Indeed, if the corset once constricted the body from without, today the demands not merely for slenderness but for a well "toned" body necessitate an ever greater interiorization of discipline (Bordo 1993). Sandra Bartky has suggested, with some plausibility, that women "have their own experience of the modernization of power, one which begins later but follows in many respects the course outlined by Foucault" (1990: 97) As women have achieved more freedom of movement, and as juridical male power over them has diminished, they have become subject to ever more demanding normalizing practices.
[13]. Beauvoir suggests this is also the case for lesbians who, while refusing to engage in "normal" heterosexual behavior, still find themselves trapped in normalizing femininity (TSS 404-24).
[14]. It is also to live in what Beauvoir (following Sartre) calls the mode of the "serious." As she wrote in The Ethics of Ambiguity, "the characteristic of the spirit of seriousness is to consider values as ready-made things"(1967: 35) and so to refuse to accept responsibility for the values implicit in one's own actions. "The serious man's [sic] dishonesty issues from his being obliged ceaselessly to renew his denial of freedom . . . The serious man must mask the movement by which he gives [values] to himself, like the mythomaniac who while reading a love-letter pretends to forget that she has sent it to herself"([1947] 1967: 47).
[15]. Although his failure to make his own values explicit invites such a reading, I don't think Foucault himself draws this conclusion from his analyses. However, it is the demobilizing consequence drawn from his work by many feminists and other radicals, who fear to speak on certain topics lest they become implicated in power. Silence, it should be remembered, can equally implicate one in power.