Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!aero!rshapiro@bbn.com
From: rshapiro@bbn.com (Richard Shapiro)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: The Power of Listening?
Message-ID: <43171@bbn.COM>
Date: 24 Jul 89 16:17:27 GMT
References: <8907221627.AA27245@cognito.>
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Reply-To: elroy!ames!BBN.COM!rshapiro (Richard Shapiro)
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In article <8907221627.AA27245@cognito.> randolph@Sun.COM (Randolph Fritz) writes:

These arguments against biological reductionism are getting a little
boring and I was about to start a new thread: the medical
objectification of women and "the gaze". And then along comes the
topic of listening as "feminine power":

>I posted, saying yes, and included the following quote from Foucault:
>
>  . . . one has to have an inverted image of power in order to believe
>  that all these voices which have spoken so long in our
>  civilization--repeating the formidable injunction to tell what one
>  is and what one does, what one recollects and what one has
>  forgotten, what one is thinking and what one thinks he is not
>  thinking--are speaking to us of freedom.
>    -- Michael Foucault, *The History of Sexuality*, volume I.
>
>Which mutated in my mind, and gave rise to the following hypothesis:
>
>  In our culture, listening, and demanding confession, are "feminine"
>  techniques of power.
>

The mutation seems very peculiar to me. Certainly the roles of
confessor, analyst, doctor which Foucault has in mind here are
classically masculine ones (and until recently, more or less
exclusively performed by men). It's generally seen to be part of a
larger 'objectification' of women -- turning women into objects of
study and contemplation. The 'sex object' notion is just a specific
instance of this more widespread practice. Foucault shows this tactic
of power to be deployed in a gender-blind way against everyone, but
others have recognized that it's particulary operative *against*
women.  The linkage you want to make seems to be: listening can be a
tactic of power; listening is passive; passive = feminine; therefore
listening is "feminine power". I think this is quite a weak case. The
kind of listening Foucault describes is definitely *not* passive.
There's a confusion here between, on the one hand, negative power vs
positive power, and on the other, active power vs passive power
(whatever that might mean). Negative power is the power that
represses, power in the more ordinary sense. Positive power is the
power that constructs. It's not correct to regard the repressive power
as active/masculine and the productive power as passive/feminine. Both
are active; both are conventionally masculine; both are in fact
practiced by men, more often than not.

The original title of Foucault's book translates as _The Will to
Knowledge_, and it's this (active) *will* which characterizes this
listening.  Foucault himself doesn't consider gender one way or the
other, but others (see below) have seen this as an example of women
as objects of male knowledge/power. 

The best extended examination of these issues from a feminist
perspective has been in film studies, with "looking" replacing
"listening" -- the gaze, as it's usually called in that context. The
construction of women in classic Hollywood movies as objects of the
gaze is by now fairly well known: the special lighting, the clothing,
the particular use of point-of-view shots. Female characters in
classic movies are denied full subjectivity; they are objects of the
gaze of viewers who are thereby constructed as implicitly male. This
argument was made by Laura Mulvey in a very famous article "Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" -- you can hardly read an article or
book of feminist film theory without running into references to this.

Often this same process works just as much at the more literal level
of the storyline. Mary Ann Doane's excellent book _The Desire to
Desire_ examines the figure of the "sick" woman, observed and coerced
back into legitimate femininity by the (male) doctor ("sickness" here
often means little more than unattractiveness). The doctor watches,
examines, listens -- he gains knowledge of the woman and thus exerts
over her the productive power which feminizes her, constructs her as a
properly gendered subject.

There are lots of important issues in this context: the gendering of
spectators, the possibility of "reading against the grain", the
marketing of films towards men or women, the possibility (or not) of
identification with characters of a different sex, etc etc.

The focus on slightly older movies is important here. They represent a
situation which is very close to our own, but just distant enough that
the unstated assumptions have begun to become visible. This can be of
enormous help in seeing our own unstated assumptions. You can watch
these movies and giggle or hiss at the blatant sexism; you can
also consider that they were not at all regarded as ridiculous or
offensive at the time, and go from that to an examination of our own
movies, our own culture, where you may very well find the same tactics
in use, only less blatantly so.