Foucault - Everything I say is a lie

After reading the first section of the History of Sexuality for the fourth time, I finally continued on and finished the book. My first thought upon completing it, besides the fact that it wasn't a very sexy theory ("You know that class on comedy - Not funny"), was that it was a little weird that there is no patriarchy in The History of Sexuality, which is a different way of telling the story. However, after I read Hartsock's piece, I began to realize that the lack of patriarchy isn't a problem, but is rather a necessary (and, I would argue, a perfectly wonderful and positive) part of Foucault's argument. Hartsock attacks Foucault's conceptualization of power on a number of fronts, but primarily upon the axis of identity politics. By splitting the world into colonizers and colonized, Hartsock posits that no white man can understand power or formulate a theory of power that would be useful to "the colonized." Without even getting into the question of whether or not an untrue theory could ever be really useful, her division is, of course, artificial and how could such an incredibly artificial division have the profound meaning that she attributes to it? The reverse, that the colonized understand their situation completely and inevitably script helpful formulations of power, is obviously false. Simple reversals do nothing but reinforce the existing paradigm. Calling "the colonizer" an undifferentiated mass does not help to differentiate and individuate "the colonized," but rather merely manages to further normalize the division of the world along lines of class, race, and gender into discrete "us" and "them" categories which can never be breached, precisely because, as Nancy Hartsock writes, the implication is that these categories are irresolvable because the people in them can never truly understand each other. Further, her suggestion that Faucault was not himself oppressed and therefore a part of the "colonized" that she describes reveals itself as false when sexuality is included along with gender, race, and class as a further axis along which oppression of some sort is ordered. As a gay man (who had to leave the communist party and died as one of the first acknowledged AIDS victims), Faucault was not writing from a position of unmitigated privilege. Certainly he had achieved something like success in his lifetime, but so too has Hartsock.
Moving on, I'd like to specifically address some of Hartsock's problems with Foucault's formulation of power. First, her suggestion that Foucault opposes "transformation" in favor of "resistance" is such a bizarre claim to me that I can not help myself from concluding that she has not understood the full implications of Foucault's texts - or that she understood them all too well. His suggestion is not that it would be impossible to change our current social system and therefore attempts at change are useless. Rather his suggestion is that no matter what changes occur, there will always be power imbedded within all relationships and that any changes which do occur will not come from a pre-discursive utopian "before power" or a future utopian "after power." It is only through understanding and using power that the social system may be changed. Hartsock specifically posits that by pointing out that power is everywhere present in all social relationships, he effectively posits that power is nowhere and suggests a "blame the victim" model. What Hartsock seems to be proposing instead is a model that revels in martyrdom and victimhood, first in her delineation of exactly who the real victims are, and then further in her rejection of Faucault because his system of power gives women "too much agency." Call me short sighted or victim blaming, but suggestion that women have the ability to act in their own self-interest to exercise positive change does not sound like a bad idea to me. I understand her reservations in that no one wants to suggest that oppressed people are simply lazy and have the ability to become un-oppressed any time they get their act together and express some of that innate agency, but this is a highly skewed reading of Faucault. In suggesting that women exercise power, Faucault does not invalidate the idea of patriarchy, rather he helps to explain a system wherein women teach their daughters to be women, wherein mothers bind their daughters feet, take them to be "circumcised," and place them under the observation of doctors and psychiatrists for showing signs of "hysteria" or active desire. Women reinforce their own position in this way not because they are oppressed by their husbands, but because they are a part of an entire social system which reinforces and produces a matrix of sexuality, parts of which could be termed patriarchal. This formulation, far from blaming victims, gives each member of society agency in the ability to change his or her own behavior. Instead of armed conflict with a massive "oppressor/colonizer," each individual’s behavior becomes the topic under consideration, and it is in this one domain that agency is possible, but only when the individual understands the systems of power which both constrain and produce his or her behavior.
To return for a moment to the question of blaming victims, the ultimate example thrown in the fact of post-structuralist critiques based on the suggestion that "nothing is real" is the example of rape. Specifically, I was once told that for a rape victim, it's not only silly but offensive to suggest that nothing, including their attack, is real. In response, I would suggest that, like the adage that all shall fade save love and music, in post-structuralism one may turn to the Lacanian philosophy that all shall fade (i.e. nothing is Real) save trauma and ecstasy. In other words, the trauma of an experience is in some way real, direct, and unmediated, but the exact cause of the trauma can never be experienced as it "really" occurred. Rape is itself a cultural construct. Access to the body without permission means different things under different circumstances, and it means differently for different bodies and in different historical periods. The meaning of rape would be vastly different were we not to hold historically contingent beliefs about the value of bodies and the value of virginity, for example. The meaning conferred upon the rape of a woman and a man are so vastly different that although something in the ballpark of one in five rape victims is a man, men are incapable of being raped within our cultural mythology - this is an act which so deeply challenges our gender norms that its existence requires a constant process of social forgetting (as Sedgewick wrote, we must, perhaps, think of the various ways of not knowing such things). Yes, there is a real thing "rape," but the fact that I have never experienced it, or the fact that were I a man I "could not" experience it (just as Foucault as a white man "could not" share the experiences of the colonized for Hartsock) does not mean that I can not understand what rape means within this culture, or why, despite my most sincere desires, it is unlikely that rape will cease to exist in the near future. None of this makes me a rapist (nor does it mean that I am not a rapist - even rapists can understand the meaning of rape - otherwise they, perhaps, woud not think to do it). The fact that Foucault suggests that patriarchy and sexuality are not "real" does not mean that he supports them as they are, or that he is trying to silence voices which speak out within the framework of these categories as subjects who have gained their identities through them. Faucault is not for silencing women, he is rather for showing all people how power has created their identities for them, or to show women how power has produced them as women.