the Female Body GOVERNING

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(feminist) subjectivity, is marked by conflict between two positions
that equally claim to represent a feminist stance but are utterly—and
presumably for the women at the time painfully—at odds with each
other. Applying Foucauldian concepts, including governmentality, to
the divergent arguments of pro-s/m lesbians and anti-s/m feminists
allows me not only to unlock theoretical and political impasses between
these two positions but also to take Foucault’s model of governmentality
to task.
Presupposing a clearly demarcated feminist movement, Macleod and
Durrheim (2002) list as the “points of convergence” between Foucault
and feminism the focus on sexuality, social domination as an aspect of
the political, a critique of humanist and scientifi c “truth,” and a concern
for personal relationships and everyday life (p. 42–43). But how can
those “points of convergences” be mapped onto a feminist project when
feminists disagree with each other precisely over the nature of sexuality
in personal relationships and everyday life in a framework of patriarchal
domination? The lesbian s/m debate is of interest for a discussion of
Foucault precisely because the issues negotiated are central to Foucault’s
own theoretical thinking: power, sexuality, and (self) knowledge. The
sex wars’ two opposing positions seem to be easily summarized: s/m
lesbians argued that employing the signifi ers of power to create pleasure
among women represents subversive and liberating appropriation of
regimes of dominance. Anti-s/m feminists argued that the signifi ers
of s/m reference violent oppression and their erotic investment is thus
juxtaposed to the feminist project of a utopian vision of nonhierarchical
sexuality. Foucault (1978/2000) understands power as neither held by
one person or group, nor operating from a center: “power relations are
rooted deep in the social nexus, not a supplementary structure over and
above ‘society’ whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of”
(p. 222). However, anti-s/m feminists conceptualize power as something
that one can resist by opposing it and positioning oneself outside of it.
To put it in simple terms: while s/m lesbians claim to transform power,
anti-s/m feminists claim to reject it. Even though both positions rely on
the centrality of the absolute signifi cance of gender, community, and a
political vision of resistance and change, notions that are either absent
in Foucault’s theoretical model (gender and community) or questioned
(resistance and change), both positions offer confl icting interpretations
of these notions.
Thus, the positions of anti-s/m feminists and s/m lesbians pose a
conceptual problem in relation to Foucault’s model of power, generally,
and governmentality, specifi cally. Can one accuse anti-s/m feminist of
misreading power or does their absolute rejection of signifi ers of patri-