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

1999: 20). A Foucauldian analysis of the ‘technologies of self’ and the analysis of
desires as discursively constitutive can be useful if it is complemented with the
regularity and pervasiveness of the gender hierarchy of patriarchal power
(Ramazanoglu, 1993; Jackson, 1999; McNay, 1992). Although a strictly Foucauldian
(1980) concept of ‘discourse’ counterposes it to ideology, it is sociologically necessary
for feminists to view “discourses as ideological in their effects” because discourses are
not divorced from structural inequalities characterizing the societies in which they are
produced (Jackson, 1999: 21, 116).
It is useful in this context to bring in Butler’s understanding of the process of becoming a
subject in order to appreciate to an extent the relationship between our individual
desires and the discourses circulating within society. Butler’s writings draw from
Foucault’s works on ‘subjectification’ and ‘regulatory power’, where power does not
affect pre-existing subjects but in fact shapes and forms subjects. Thus to be “subject to
a regulation is also to become subjectivated by it, that is, to be brought into being as a
subject precisely through being regulated” (Butler, 2004: 41). To Butler, our bodies are
constituted politically by social vulnerability (18) as the very idea of ‘being a person’
relates to the desire of ‘being recognized’. Recognition in turn is dependent on existing
social norms that are located outside of one’s immediate choices or control. It is in this
paradoxical situation of critique of normalizing practices and need for recognition for a
subject to exist – where feminist politics is located.
Plummer suggested that as we approached the millennium we were faced with two
contending stories of gender, ‘a narrative of abolished gender’ and ‘a narrative of
polarized gender’ (1995: 158). This basic paradox of modern feminism of undertsanding
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