Title: Gender-sensitive Forms of governmentality in late capitalist societies

Autor: Johanna Grubner und Michaela Scheriau

Conference: Rethinking Foucaults’s Historical Ontology of Ourselves: Subject, Subjectivation, Self- Practices 40 Years After

Published: 2024

Full Text available: Here

Citation:

Grubner, J., & Scheriau, M. (2024). Rethinking Foucaults’s Historical Ontology of Ourselves: Subject, Subjectivation, Self- Practices 40 Years After. In Foucault: 40 Years After. Retrieved from https://www.uibk.ac.at/en/socialtheory/foucault/.

Abstract:

About the form of power in late capitalist societies Foucault says that it is “a total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action. A set of actions upon other actions” (Foucault 1983: 220). Furthermore, according to Foucault, wherever the behavior of people becomes the subject of discourse, the political rationality that strives for the conduct of individuals can be found (Soiland 2005: 21). In this sense, the discourse of freedom, which propagates the subject's freedom to act, as it is invoked, for example, in the governance mechanisms of NPM, represents a central moment of observation of the interlocking of technologies of the self and disciplinary technologies of power. Following a feminist reception of Foucault, in our contribution we discuss the interaction of these power techniques along two theses:

1. If freedom is conceived as a constitutive power-integrating relationship of the subject, an understanding of gender opens up that no longer constitutes it through an incorporated external constraint and thus poses the question of resistance to neoliberal gender hierarchy in a new way.

2. Women, and young women in particular, are involved in these newly created power relations in a very specific way (Fraser 2009, Soiland 2015, McRobbie 2010). The specific nature of these power relations is to meet the demands of a globalized economy and to ensure the availability of female workers by creating and monitoring appropriate conditions. This brings into focus a "gender-sensitive" form of governmentality (McRobbie 2010: 19), which offers women a kind of "rhetorical equality", but is ultimately linked to a potential rejection of more radical feminist demands and perspectives.