Power And Power In Foucault

The writings of Foucault, Bartky, Butler, and Bordo are significantly separate from each other in the issues that they grapple with within the body of their texts but their also overlap on major points, as is to be expected when many people write on the same subject. Each of these writers is concerned with different aspects of power and how that power is used and how it operates within our society. Most of these writers are feminist theorists and concerned with the ways that the female body is affected by power used against her while Foucault is less concerned with how power affects female bodies specifically but that can be seen as a result of his lack of connection to feminist thought. If Foucault mentions women and how they are affected

More easily understood Foucault is presenting forth the idea of hegemony, or the thought that power structures exist because everyone buys into them. For example, women’s dress in business situations. For the most part, women are expected to dress in nigh uncomfortable clothes in the work place: skirts, heels, makeup (to a degree). Women accept this, men accept this, and everyone in society accepts this as a norm. Because it is seen as “normal” rather than something forced upon women by a group, other women will police their peers: sharp looks, snide comments, etc. This norm is policed by those who are trapped by it and they never think about why it is they are required to dress as they

Bartky says that “femininity is artifice…a mode of enacting and reenacting…gender norms” (Bartky, 313) while Butler’s near famous statement concerns the idea that “gender is performative [and] it constitutes as an effect the very subject it appears to express” (Butler, 319). Going back to the example of women’s business formal, and even in some cases business casual, attire we can see both of these statements within the same issue. Women dress in these particular and uncomfortable ways because it is a social and gender norm for them to do so while it is also a costume that they are putting on in order to perform a certain role. Few women truly enjoy some of the material trappings forced upon us: heels are uncomfortable for long hours standing, most skirts offer low mobility, etc. Women are required to put on this costume though because they are required to perform to an adequate degree to the expectations around their gender, they must perform their gender for those around them in order to be considered effective at their