the Female Body GOVERNING

11
Feminism’s Sex Wars
and the Limits of Governmentality
BARBARA MENNEL
University of Florida
Governmentality, Michel Foucault’s (1978/2000) concept that
enables us to theorize the linkage between governing and power, on the
one hand, and power and subjectivity, on the other, has received limited
reception by feminists, even though particularly the latter concern, the
relation between gendered (state) power and gendered subjectivity,
centrally shapes feminist projects. In general, the productivity of
Foucault’s work for feminists remains controversial. Feminist responses
to his work include a wholesale import of his theoretical and methodological
framework, concessions of partial productivity, accusations of
blind spots, and outright rejection. 1 Feminist engagements with Foucault
tend to focus on disciplinary technologies, biopower, resistance, and the
techniques of the self, while “theoretical debates on the usefulness of
governmentality for feminism are in relatively short supply” as Catriona
Macleod and Kevin Durrheim (2002) rightly point out. Pragmatically,
Macleod and Durrheim suggest that “this ellipsis is possibly due to the
fact that his lectures on governmentality were unpublished until the
1990s, and are available largely from secondary sources” (p. 42).
Yet, I suggest that Foucault’s intellectual interests and the political and
theoretical trajectory of the feminism moved into opposite directions
during the late 1970s and early 1980s: Foucault moved outward from
his interest in micropower to theorizing governmentality, including
the state, whereas feminism shifted its attention from the power of
the state and institutions to female sexuality, desire, and subsequently
subjectivity. Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann, and Thomas Lemke
(2000) add a regional and disciplinary dimension to the account of the
reception of Foucault’s work in general, and governmentality studies
in particular, by claiming that primarily social and political sciences
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