narratives of three generations of urban middle-class - eTheses ...

In this context of appreciating heterosexualities as experiences rather than a historically
and culturally undifferentiated, over determining top-down, repressive force, a
Foucauldian (1990) analysis of power as constitutive rather than merely repressive (95)
could be useful. It sensitizes us to the multiplicity and contradictory ways in which
heterosexuality is constructed and regulated, particularly at the level of individual
subjectivities (Weedon, 1987). Various heterosexual feminists, for instance, have
personally struggled against hetero-normativity, questioned and reconceptualized
phallocentric models of sexuality and defined individual pleasure in ways that cannot be
read as passivity (Smart, 1996b; Hollway, 1993, Segal, 1994).
Foucault has, however, been critiqued by feminists for his gender blindness and for not
linking his concept of socially diffuse power to structural analysis of inequalities
(Ramazanoglu, 1993). As argued by Jackson (1999: 20), “The discourses around
sexuality circulating within modern Western culture have been framed from a
predominantly white and middle-class, as well as male and heterosexual, perspective,
and bear the marks of our imperialist history”. Therefore, any critique of heterosexuality
that attends to its institutionalization as a hegemonic norm, should also analyze the
intersectionality of heterosexuality with the discourses of race (Mohanty, 1991) and
class (Skeggs, 1997; Lawler, 1999). With the incorporation of the sociological
mediations of race, class and gender, a Foucauldian understanding of sexuality as an
object of regulatory discourses and practices can be made more appropriate. Jackson
argues that libertarian arguments use Foucault selectively, emphasizing only that
aspect of his work which sees ‘bodies and pleasures’ as sites of resistance to power,
not recognizing the constitutive effects of power as creating the very desire (Jackson,
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