Hi Kyle and Alexander,
welcome to the list! Both your posts are explanatory, non-apologetic, clear and powerful.
My only comment to Kyle is that I would use the term ‘subjectivities’ rather than 'identities’. Subjectivities in the Foucauldian sense, as in subject to discursive networks of power through which intersections of social categories (eg. feminine, dis-abled, black, poor, elderly, Indigenous) position certain individuals in those networks in relation to other individuals more powerfully positioned through the intersection of their social categories (hegemonic masculine, white, able-bodied, wealthy, Global Northern, etc).
Subjectivities moves what your speaking about beyond the idea of identities as an assemblages of individual attributes and towards the material effects on particular individuals (who are subject to discipline) as they move through different networks of power. Discipline from Foucault, and subjectivities from post-structural feminist theorists. Terry Threadgold provides a useful explanation of Foucault’s idea of discipline – I’ve cut and pasted from my thesis by way of explanation, and can provide references if anyone wants.
cheers, teena
> It's hard to be a Middle-class White Male Academic.
> It sounds like you need a safe space, but wait, "you already have one”
Feminist poststructuralist understandings about the relations between gender, power and knowledge presuppose a concept of power as a relational and productive force rather than a ‘negative, repressive entity’ (McNay 1992, p. 38) that some people have and others do not. Power is thus conceived as a spatial organisation of various forms of cellular grids or nodal networks (Foucault 1970/1971). Organised as social networks, discourses and bodies ‘circulate’ in space, regulated by discipline, which is an apparatus for the control of populations (Threadgold 1997, p. 24). To unpack this a little, bodies and speech are disciplined by discourse, the structured regularities of which are ‘related to the subject through desire…in the form of the power of knowing, and the will to know’ (p. 26).
For Threadgold, the ‘microphysics of power’ that organise disciplines function by ‘naming and classifying, distributing and positioning, belong[ing] to no individual but locat[ing] everyone’ (p. 26). Disciplines are regulated by textual practices, while the practices of positioning oneself within a discipline produce the self and also the field. Yet, as Threadgold explains, citing Foucault (1970/1971), ‘Discipline is unauthored, anonymous. It is not owned by those it disciplines and it remains a discipline only as long as it can continue to produce – ‘ad infinitum—fresh propositions’’ (p. 23). In other words, disciplines operate to control chance and contain bodies and speech. Yet because they rely on the continual reproduction of discourse, disciplines are also subject to change.
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