The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy

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Johanna Oksala

Introduction

Power is a pivotal concept for feminist theory. While feminists strongly disagree on a host of issues, most of them take it for granted that feminism is at least somehow concerned with power relations between men and women. Whether they use the word “oppression,” “subjection,” “subordination,” or “domination,” the key claim is that these power relations are problematic—illegitimate or unjust. As a political project, feminism aims to alter, subvert, or eradicate them; as a theoretical project it aims to expose and understand them.

Power is a highly contested philosophical concept, however, not just in feminist philosophy, but in critical social and political theory more generally. While some philosophers have cast doubt on the possibility of there being some entity called “power” that could be usefully studied or systematically defined, others have argued that any objective, theoretical definition of power is impossible because our conceptions of power are themselves shaped by power relations (see e.g., Foucault 1982; 1991; Lukes 2005 [1974]). They contend that ultimately all conceptions of power are an outcome of political contestation and struggle, and depending on how we conceive of power, we may end up with very different views on its legitimacy and desirability, and hence its concrete political implications. As Steven Lukes formulates this:

[H]ow we think of power may serve to reproduce and reinforce power structures and relations, or alternatively it may challenge and subvert them. It may contribute to their continued functioning, or it may unmask their principles of operation, whose effectiveness is increased by their being hidden from view.

(Lukes 2005 [1974]: 63)

Accepting such a politicized view of power does obviously not preclude the importance studying it—on the contrary. It is vital that feminists take part in the political contestation over the meaning of power in order to endorse conceptions of it that are theoretically and politically effective for the attempts to resist male domination.

In this chapter, I will provide a critical overview of the most common ways of understanding power in feminist theory. I will begin by examining the distinction between two broad theoretical models—power-over and power-to—and I will discuss some of the feminist attempts to appropriate these models. I will then look at systemic accounts of power and focus on Marxist and poststructuralist approaches. I will discuss Michel Foucault’s conception of power in particular, as it is arguably the most influential approach to power in contemporary feminist philosophy. I will conclude by considering some of the consequences of the feminist views on power for the crucial question of resistance.

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Power-Over and Power-To

The most common way of defining power is to understand it simply as a capacity to get someone else to do what you want them to do. Robert Dahl’s influential definition, for example, states “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do” (1957: 202–203). This “intuitive view” of power underlies most feminist accounts of gender oppression: in patriarchal societies men generally have the capacity to exercise power over women through various means ranging from physical coercion to subtle forms of discrimination and belittling.

The most extreme form of power over someone is arguably slavery, and for the early feminist writers such as Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft, slavery and the abolitionist debate provided a model for theorizing power (Astell 1996; Wollstonecraft 2001). Astell, a contemporary of John Locke, asked sarcastically: “if all Men are born Free, how is it that all Women are born Slaves” (Astell 1996: 18). Wollstonecraft’s major polemic A Vindication of the Rights of Women also adapts the terms of contemporary political debate on slavery. Throughout the eighteenth century, feminist writers railed against marriage as a form of slavery. The power relations between men and women were viewed as relations of domination and coercion similar to the relations between slave owners and slaves. Until late into the nineteenth century the legal and civil position of a wife resembled that of a slave. Like a slave, she was her husband’s possession in the sense that she had no legal existence apart from him, and he was also entitled to punish her physically.

By the time the second-wave feminist movement emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, the legal and civil position of women in most nations had dramatically improved, yet the power imbalances between men and women seemed to persist. The theoretical model of master/slave remained central in many of the radical feminist accounts of gender oppression at the time. The imbalance between power and powerlessness was understood as definitional for what it meant to be a man or a woman. In other words, the key feminist claim was that the categories of men and women were not just politically neutral descriptions, symmetrical and complementary, but in a gendered social order such as ours being a woman was only possible as a being subordinated to men. As the American legal theorists, Catharine MacKinnon provocatively put it: “women/men is a distinction not just of difference, but of power and powerlessness . . . power/powerlessness is the sex difference” (1987: 123). Sexuality became the flashpoint of the radical feminist analyses. It was not just a central arena of male domination; sexuality itself was understood as a form of power.

A woman is a being who identifies and is identified as one whose sexuality exists for someone else, who is socially male. Women’s sexuality is the capacity to arouse desire in that someone . . . Sexual objectification is the primary process of the subjection of women . . . Man fucks woman; subject verb object.

(MacKinnon 1983: 533)

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The political philosopher Carole Pateman’s seminal book The Sexual Contract (1988) also relies on the master/slave model for understanding how male domination becomes constitutive of the meaning of the gender difference itself. She examines critically the story of the social contract, perhaps the most celebrated story of modern philosophy hailing universal freedom as the guiding principle of our historical era. Pateman contends that only half of that story is ever told: standard commentaries do not mention that women were excluded from the contract. The naturally free and equal individuals who people the pages written by social contract theorists are a disparate collection, covering “the spectrum of Rousseau’s social beings to Hobbes’ entities reduced to matter in motion,” but what they have in common is that they are all male (Pateman 1988: 41).

In other words, the theory states that, if relations of subordination between men are to be legitimate, they must originate in a contract. Women were not party to the contract, they are subject to it: the contract established not only men’s political freedom, but also their political right over women and their bodies—essentially the right of a master over a slave. Pateman argues that the significance of this position is not limited to a bit of poor philosophical reasoning by philosophers long dead. The structures of our society and our everyday lives still incorporate features of a patriarchal conception of marriage and family. Husbands obviously no longer enjoy the extensive rights over their wives that they still possessed in the mid-nineteenth century. However, aspects of conjugal subjection linger on, both in cultural attitudes, and in the legal jurisdictions of the many countries that refuse to admit that rape is possible within marriage, for example.

The problem with the master/slave model for theorizing women’s subordination is that it makes it difficult to account for women’s agency and resistance. Feminist theory clearly calls for a conception of power that does not view women solely as helpless victims of overbearing male power, but recognizes their specific strengths and strategies of resistance. A further problem concerns the desirability of such power: if feminists want women to gain more power, is the power of a master over a slave really the kind of power they want? Do they want to exercise more power if power means seeking hierarchical control, causing others to submit to one’s will or limiting and putting down another person?

These problems have prompted many feminists to criticize views of power that conceive it only negatively, as power over somebody. They have sought to develop instead alternative accounts of power that define power as a positive capacity to act, as a power to do something. They have turned to the thought of the political philosopher Hannah Arendt for help, for example (see, e.g., Hartsock 1983; Honig 1995). Arendt offers a classic definition of a positive conception of power when she defines it as “the human ability not just to act but to act in concert” (Arendt 1970: 44). Her key idea is that power is never a means to something else, but an end in itself and should therefore be sharply distinguished from such related concepts as authority, strength, force, and violence. Power is essentially the shared ability to bring about change, to collectively and creatively transform and shape the world.

Feminists from various other theoretical backgrounds such as ecofeminism and maternal feminism have also argued that feminists need a conception of power that is integrally tied to the feminist idea of empowerment. Feminists should theorize power as a capacity to positively transform oneself and others. Jean Baker Miller (1992: 241–243), for example, argues that it is a convenient myth that women do not and should not have power. If we re-think power as the capacity to produce a change, then it is clear that women, in their traditional role as mothers and caretakers, have invariably exercised power to foster the growth of others. “This might be called using one’s power to empower another—increasing the other’s resources, capabilities, effectiveness, and ability to act” (Miller 1992: 242). The problem is that we are not accustomed to include such effective action within the accepted notions of power and therefore end up overlooking the strengths that women have demonstrated all through history. In other words, the fact that women are often reluctant to take or exercise power over others does not indicate that women have a problem; it indicates that there is a problem in our understanding of power, as well as in our relationships with each other in patriarchal society (see also e.g., Held 1993).

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Feminists working in the liberal tradition also usually understand power as a positive social good, a resource or a capacity that should be equally distributed among individuals in society. The problem that liberal feminists seek to combat is the unequal distribution of power among men and women, and their political aim is to create equal opportunities for women to acquire more political and economic power. Betty Friedan (1968: 454), the author of the feminist classic The Feminine Mystique (1963), for example, argued that women “need political power” meaning equal access to political institutions (on liberal feminist approaches, see also, e.g., Okin 1989).

Whether we understand power as power-over or power-to both of these approaches suffer from an important oversight, however. Their focus is on individual women’s capacities and/or their relationships to individual men. This means that they have difficulties accounting for the systemic or structural aspects of power. Liberal feminists’ understanding of power as a resource or a capacity, for example, does not seem to recognize sufficiently the relational and contextual character of power. Women’s lack of power cannot be understood in isolation and independently of their relationships to men in a patriarchal society. Feminist critiques of liberalism have foregrounded the insight that any critical social theory that begins with an isolated individual is bound to lead to absurd political consequences. People are always members of communities, and only their fundamental social bonds and familial ties make individual interests and goals possible. Liberal rights thus falsely equate emancipation with protected isolation (on feminist critiques of liberalism, see e.g., Elshtain 1981; Young 1990; Brown 2005).

When power is understood as power-over or a relationship of domination, on the other hand, this view also seems to leave the systemic or structural constraints out of the picture. It is obviously important to acknowledge that power relations are ultimately always exercised between individual subjects, but in order to understand how they function and why they persist, it is often not very helpful to focus on the motives or intentions of the individual actors. Instead it is crucial to examine the larger societal structures, rationalities and norms that make the actions of the individual actors possible and intelligible. Amy Allen (1996: 267) formulates this idea by arguing that an adequate feminist theory of power should include both the micro-level and the macro-level analyses. The micro-level analysis would examine a specific power relation between two individuals or groups of individuals. The macro-level analysis, on the other hand, should focus on the background to such particular power relations. It must examine the cultural meanings, practices, and larger structures of domination that make up the context within which a particular power relation is able to emerge. A feminist analysis of power relations that remained solely on the micro level would be seriously inadequate because power relations studied in isolation from their cultural and institutional context can be easily perceived as anomalies, and not as part of a larger system of domination such as sexism (Allen 1996: 268).

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Socialist Feminist Approaches

Socialist feminists have readily appropriated this imperative to focus on the macro level in their analyses of power. They have emphasized the necessity to study the systemic aspects of capitalism in particular. When attempting to understand such diverse contemporary feminist issues as the feminization of poverty, the rapid growth of the sex industry in the global South or the care deficit in the global North, it seems apparent that feminists need a critical analysis of global capitalism and its implications for gender oppression.

Marx’s important contribution in his major work Capital, Volume 1 was to bring to light how behind the supposedly free relations of exchange between individual capitalists and workers laid deeper structures of exploitation. For Marx, an obvious problem with the idyllic picture that the defenders of the “free market” were portraying was that the worker and the capitalist were not in a symmetrical situation when they came to exchange their products—labor power for money. The capitalist was not forced to buy anything because he was in a position to wait, move his factory elsewhere, or reinvest his money in something else. The worker, on the other hand, could not wait. He constantly had to sell his labor power if he wanted to survive, because in a capitalist system all other means of making a living had been eradicated. Marx argued that a society of landless wage laborers with nothing but their labor power to sell was an historical outcome of the social upheaval that followed the breakdown of feudalism. It was not a result of some natural inequality of talents and preferences—some people did not freely choose to become workers and some capitalists. Deliberate and violent political acts, such as the appropriation of common resources and property legislation favoring rich landowners, led to the accumulation of property and raw materials into the hands of a few and made it necessary for the vast masses of landless peasants to sell their labor power. In other words, in the new commercial society organized on the principles of private ownership and monetary exchanges new kinds of power relations were established between people: behind the supposedly free relations of exchange lay a structural, institutionalized compulsion for the worker to sell his labor power to the capitalist.

Feminist thinkers appropriating the Marxist framework have argued that the structural domination of the working class by the capitalist class was analogous to the domination of women by men in a patriarchal society. Women formed an oppressed class in relation to men in capitalism because they had been forced to bear the responsibility for social reproduction—the daily, intergenerational, social and biological reproduction of the workforce. While capitalism was also exploiting women’s labor power through varied forms of waged labor, women were still expected to do another shift at home for free. They were expected to do housework, clean, cook, and so on, but they were also mainly responsible for social reproduction in a much broader sense: the socialization of the young, the maintenance of social bonds and production and reproduction of shared meanings and values (for some pioneering Marxist-feminist work on social reproduction, see e.g., Vogel 1983; Dalla Costa and James 1997).

The imposition of social reproduction on women has been effectively disguised either as a woman’s free choice, or as her natural propensity, however. Marxist-feminists insisted that the care work women did at home had to be finally recognized as a systemic condition indispensable for capitalism: it was materially producing and forming capitalism’s human subjects, the exploitable workers the capitalist economic systems needs in order to function properly and to continue to generate wealth. Historically, capitalism’s social organization thus rests on a structural division between the private, familial, female sphere of reproduction and the public, male sphere of production. As Nancy Fraser writes:

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With capitalism . . . reproductive labor is split off, relegated to a separate, “private” sphere, where its social importance is obscured. And where money is the primary medium of power, the fact of its being unpaid seals the matter: those who do this work are structurally subordinate to those who earn cash wages, even as their work also supplies necessary preconditions for wage labor.

(Fraser 2014: 8)

In the 1970s, feminist theory in Western Europe was to a large extent dominated by Marxism and the parallel questions of class and gender oppression. However, the Marxist-feminist attempts to model gender oppression on the model of class oppression suffered from various theoretical problems and became progressively marginalized in the 1980s and 1990s. While effectively exposing forms of exploitation and alienation, Marxist theory tended to theorize power relations in terms of class antagonism between capital and the proletariat. Women did not form a unified class with similar interests and needs, however. Instead the intersections of class, gender, and racial oppression seemed to call for more specific and historically varied analyses than what was allowed by the framework of class antagonism.

Poststructuralist Feminist Approaches

At this theoretical and political crossroads Michel Foucault’s conception of power opened up completely new avenues for feminist theory. Although Foucault had little interest in the feminist politics of his time, his theorization of the various historical rationalities and technologies of power has both opened up new resources for feminist critique, as well as being controversial among feminists. The feminist body of work appropriating Foucault’s analysis of power that exists today is exceedingly large and diverse (see e.g., Sawicki 1991; McNay 1992; McWhorter 1999; Heyes 2007; Oksala 2016).

Foucault insisted that one should not start by looking for the center of power, or for the individuals, institutions or classes that rule, but should rather construct a “microphysics of power” that focuses on the extremities: families, workplaces, everyday practices, and marginal institutions. One has to analyze power relations from the bottom up and not from the top down, and to study the myriad ways in which the power relations operate in different but intersecting capillary networks (Foucault 1978: 94–96).

The idea of a microphysics of power resonated strongly with the feminist credo that personal was political. The second-wave feminists saw it as vitally important to expose power relations in what was considered the private sphere, and not only in what was considered the public and properly political sphere. The feminist establishment of sexual politics as a central area of struggle required a conception of power that was able to account for its capillary forms in everyday practices and habits. Feminist theorists appropriated the idea of a microphysics of power by studying the different ways that women shape their bodies, for example—from cosmetic surgery to dieting and eating disorders. They analyzed these everyday feminine practices as disciplinary technologies in the service of patriarchal, normalizing power. These normative practices train the female body in docility and obedience to cultural demands, while at the same time they are often paradoxically experienced in terms of “power” and “control” by the women themselves (see, e.g., Bartky 1988, 2002; Bordo 1989, 2001).

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Apart from the idea that power is always relational, capillary, and diffuse, Foucault’s conception of power also provided another major insight for feminism: power relations are productive of the subjects embedded in them. His perhaps most important theoretical contribution for feminist theory has been his idea of productive power, the idea that power does not operate primarily through repression, prohibition, and censorship, but is essentially productive. Being a subject, a socially recognized individual with intelligible intentions, desires and actions, is only possible within the power/knowledge networks of a society. Individuals do not enter the public, political arena as fully formed subjects who then demand rights and represent interests. The supposedly personal or private aspects of their being are already traversed by power relations, which not only restrain them, but produce them as certain kinds of subjects. In other words, the subjects over whom the power network is defined cannot be thought to exist apart from it.

The consequences of the idea of productive power for feminist theory were momentous: it formed the starting point of what has undoubtedly been the most influential appropriation of Foucault’s thought for gender theory, namely Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990). The book opens with troubling questions: If we accept Foucault’s argument about productive power and acknowledge that subjects are produced by power relations, does this not imply that the subject of feminism, “women,” is produced by the very same oppressive power relations that it aims to theorize and eradicate? Would “women” even exist if society was not structured by sexist power relations? Who are the subjects that feminism aims to liberate?

Butler thus takes on Foucault’s idea of productive power and asks what the consequences of this idea are for feminist politics. She insists that it implies that it is not enough to try to include more women in politics or to seek to represent their interests more effectively. We have to ask more fundamentally who these women are: how the very identity and the category of women are constituted through practices of power. This implies reconsidering the viability of feminist identity politics. The problem is not merely that the category of women denies the differences between women and thereby inadvertently privileges one group of women. More fundamentally, we have to pose critical questions about the desirability of embracing an oppressive identity that excluded women from politics in the first place.

It is no exaggeration to say that Gender Trouble caused a paradigm shift in the way that the intertwinement of power, feminist emancipation and the female subject was theorized. It was subjected to extensive feminist commentary, and Butler responded to the criticism in the books that followed Gender Trouble (Butler 1993; 1997; 2004).

Foucault’s views on power and Butler’s appropriation of them have also been formative for the key ideas behind queer politics: the identities of gay and lesbian—as well as of heterosexual—are not essential or authentic identities, but are culturally constructed through the power relations regulating the “healthy” and “normal” expressions of sexuality. This does not mean that homosexuality does not “really” exist. Just because something is constructed through practices of power does not mean that it is not real. People are defined by and must think and live according to such constructions. This idea does have important consequences for how we conceive of resistance, however, as I will show in the last section (on projects delineating “queer feminism” with the help of Foucault’s work, see, e.g., Winnubst 2006; Huffer 2010; Sawicki 2013).

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Power and Violence

In my own work (Oksala 2012) I have argued that Foucault’s conception of power and the way that he theoretically distinguishes it from violence can also be helpful for feminist attempts to theorize gendered forms of violence such as domestic violence. It is my contention that a Foucauldian approach to gendered violence accomplishes two things: it refuses to explain men’s violence against women in terms of inherent male aggression, yet it makes it possible to argue that it is not just incidental, but has structural and macro-level political aspects.

Foucault explicitly distinguished power from violence and denied that the essence of power would be violence. In his seminal essay “Subject and Power” from 1982 he poses the classic question of political philosophy—the same one as Hannah Arendt did in On Violence, for example—namely whether violence is simply the ultimate form of power (Foucault 1982: 220). He also follows Arendt in his negative reply, and puts forward an oppositional view of the relationship between power and violence. They are opposites in the sense that where one rules absolutely the other is absent. Foucault distinguishes power from violence by arguing that a power relationship is a mode of action that does not act directly and immediately on others, but rather acts upon their actions: it is a set of actions upon other actions. This means, first, that the one over whom power is exercised is thoroughly recognized as a subject, as a person who acts. Second, he or she must be free, meaning here that when faced with a relationship of power, “a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions may open up” (Foucault 1982: 220). Violence, on the other hand, acts directly and immediately on the body. It is not an action upon an action of a subject, but an action upon a body or things.

Foucault’s view here seems, at first glance, to explicitly support a gender-neutral view on violence: men have power over women in our society, but their power is not based on or upheld by violence. To exercise power is not to physically determine the conduct of passive objects, but to govern actions. A more careful reading of Foucault’s writings on power and violence complicates the picture, however. He argued that even though power relations were essentially fluid and reversible, what usually characterized power was that these relationships had become stabilized through institutions. This means that the mobility of power relations is limited, and that there are strongholds that are difficult to suppress because they have been institutionalized in courts, codes, and so on. In other words, the power relations between people have become rigid (Foucault 1997: 169).

Patriarchal power, or power of men over women in our society, provides clear examples of institutionalized and rigid power relations or states of domination. The ongoing feminist struggles have made it obvious that the subordination of women is difficult to eradicate because it is often codified in economic and institutional structures. The fluidity and reversibility of the individual power relations between men and women have, in many cases, been effectively blocked. In a situation in which a woman is unable to leave her violent husband because of economic reasons and child care arrangements, for example, the power relation is clearly a form of domination that is, furthermore, linked with violence (Oksala 2012: 70–71).

Moreover, Foucault’s analyses of governmentality open up a wider perspective on the issue of gendered violence (Foucault 2007; 2008). The practices and institutions of power are always enabled, regulated, and justified by a specific form of reasoning or rationality. The analytics of power technologies concentrates not only on the mechanisms of power, but also on the rationality that is part of the practices of governing. It is important to point out that while practices of power have rationality, so do practices of violence. Foucault repeatedly emphasized that there was no incompatibility between violence and rationality, but what is most dangerous about violence is its rationality (Foucault 2001: 803).

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On this basis we could argue that what is most dangerous about gendered violence are those aspects of it that make it look like perfectly rational behavior. Even though male domination and male violence against women should not be theoretically conflated, feminist analysis must study the extent to which rationalities upholding male domination and those supporting forms of male violence against women are interrelated, mutually supportive, or even identical. When a form of rationality according to which a husband’s responsibility is to provide for but also to control his wife and children is coupled with the acceptance of physical force as a means of control, for example, the patterns of domestic violence are set. From a Foucauldian perspective, therefore, it is important to take seriously the feminist insight that inequality between men and women is a key factor in explaining phenomena such as domestic violence. Domestic violence is effectively depoliticized when it is viewed in gender-neutral terms and reduced to an individual pathology. What is required is a careful analysis of the functioning, maintenance, and legitimacy of the power technologies on which it rests (Oksala 2012: 71).

Resistance

The key problem with systemic accounts of power seems to be how to account for agency and resistance. If subjects are always caught up in large social and economic structures such as capitalism and patriarchy that operate with deeply ingrained systemic logics, there seems to be very little that the subjects can do in order to affect change. Moreover, if we accept Foucault’s claim that power is constitutive of the subject itself, we seem to be unable to distinguish genuine resistance from conformity: agency, autonomy, and resistance appear to be merely illusions or power’s clever ruses.

For Foucault, power does not form a deterministic system of overbearing constraints, however. Because it is understood as an unstable network of practices, where there is power, there is resistance. What makes his position contested—and original—is precisely the way he understands the relationship between power and resistance. He forbids us to think that resistance is outside of power and also denies that we could ever locate it in a single point: “there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary” (Foucault 1978: 95). To view the relationship between power and resistance as external would mean misunderstanding the relational character of power. Because power is not something that an individual acquires, holds or gives away, its existence depends on resistance: since power exists only in a relation, resistance must be located in these very same power relations.

The aim of feminist politics becomes more complicated than liberation from patriarchal power and the affirmation of one’s true gender identity: resisting power entails questioning and even denying the identities that are imposed on us by making visible their cultural construction and dependence on the power relations that are operative in society. The goal is not a discovery of an identity, but its critical deconstruction.

In sum, an adequate understanding of power is crucial for any feminist theorizing of gender subordination, as well as the attempts to transform it. We have to recognize that even our innermost selves are always constituted in social and political practices incorporating gendered power relations. Without an adequate acknowledgment of how widespread and systematic power relations are and how profoundly they constitute the subjects’ interests, desires and capacities for critical reflection we will not be able to understand the extent and the recalcitrance of gender oppression. However, we also have to maintain an adequate understanding of agency and feminist resistance. Conceptions of power that fail to account for the possibility of some measure of resistance will make it impossible to theorize feminist transformations—transformations of the self as well as political transformations. Moreover, our theoretical understanding of resistance has to translate into concrete practices of resistance. Feminism as a political project must aim at profound social transformation, not merely at some quantitative gain such as increase in women’s power, political rights, or social benefits, for example. It has to aim to also change who we are and how we relate to each other.

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