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Anarchic Bodies: Foucault and the Feminist Question of Experience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Johanna Oksala
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Abstract

The article shows that Michel Foucault's account of the sexual body is not a naive return to a prediscursive body, nor does it amount to discourse reductionism and to the exclusion of experience, as some feminists have argued. Instead, Foucault's idea of bodies and pleasures as a possibility of the counterattack against normalizing power presupposes an experiential understanding of the body. The experiential body can become a locus of resistance because it is the possibility of an unpredictable event.

Type
Research Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , Fall 2004 , pp. 99 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 by Hypatia, Inc.

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