Hi Keith,
I am not entirely sure what you mean by ‘self-governance’ – are you suggesting that individuals can govern their own practices, or that a discipline can be self-governing? As in my last post, Foucault understands discipline as 'unauthored, anonymous. It is not owned by those it disciplines’. It is instead, a set of discursive practices of power governing who can say what, when and where, and who responds and how.
My claim is that gendered practices manifest externally and impact in material ways on the individual body through institutional discourses that Foucault called (disciplinary) surveillance – ie. what it is acceptable to do, say, wear, signal, etc. in any given context – and internalised by individuals through self-surveillance (deciding whether to post, what to say, how to say it – read Eva Bendix-Pedersen’s dissertation for a full explanation on academic writing, which she depicts through the metaphor of the finger hovering over the backspace key). Therefore gendered practices cannot be ‘superior’, they are produced and reproduced through disciplinary performances, yet experienced differently by different bodies. In my understanding of practices, there is no neutral because they are all exercises of power.
And yes, because most institutional practices were established by certain kinds of men who exercise power, and maintained and reproduced by women as well as men, they are gendered.
Note that I said gendered practices (plural) as there are many different forms – Joan Acker has a very useful 5-tier structure of institutional practices that enable the performance of ‘gender’ (which here is understood as a verb, not a noun or personal attribute).This means that people don’t ‘have’ a gender, they ‘do’ gender, or perform (practice) in ways that are subject to discipline. These are all really tricky theoretical ideas not easily explained in a single post.
I am not sure what you mean by transcendence. I said disruption. Given they need to be recited over time to survive, disciplinary discourses are unstable, which means they can be changed. In the case of gendering, heteronormative Western white masculine practices need to be disrupted (from reproduction) to incur change.
What do you mean by Other other? Are you trying to be cute? To quote an infamous Australian, please explain. I can’t begin to respond to the question of what is a rewritten Other without knowing what you mean here.
all the best,
teena
> Dear Teena,
>
> So, is self-governance folded into gendered practice? Is gendered practice
> prior to self-governance? Is it superior? What is the operational
> relationship in any critique? Do I firstly dismiss any notion that
> self-governance might be occurring in a neutral way and go straight to
> gendered practices as the necessary condition of any and all discourse?
>
> Is there no possibility of transcendance? Is the Other other already male?
> What is a rewritten Other?
>
> Cheers
>
> keith
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