In political discourse, liberalism and Marxism traditionally focus on state institutions and economic systems to understand and address oppression. However, post-structuralists like Foucault and Butler argue that this approach is inadequate because it overlooks the diffuse and productive nature of power. They contend that subjectivity—the process by which individuals are constituted as subjects—is a crucial site where power operates. For post- structuralists, subjectivity is both the locus of control and oppression and a space in which individuals can resist and redefine their imposed identities. This understanding redefines the objectives of emancipatory projects aimed at responding to injustice and oppression.

In Subject and Power, Foucault advocates for a shift in understanding power, focusing on the structures and discourse which produce subjects. Foucault advocates for a ‘new economy of power relations’,1 which sought to understand the diffusive exercise of power by locating it within power-relations. He believes that power is not specific to any particular context, like the economy or certain institutions such as the state, but rather a network of sorts, highlighting its diffuse nature, as ‘something which circulates’ through power-relations.2 It is through power-relations that the subject is born. Foucault identifies three ways in which the subject is ‘objectivized’ to become subjects.3 The first is scientific classification in which discourse of knowledge categorises people using a language to define individuals.4 Building on this is his second point which he calls ‘dividing practices’,5 which such knowledge of these distinction between individuals divides them into ‘a series of opposites’,6 leading to the marginalisation and control of the ‘deviant’: ‘the mad...the sick...the criminals’.7 These ideas coalesce in his third point which is ‘subjectification’, which realise the ‘subject’, ‘mark[ing]’ a law of ‘truth on him which he must recognize and which others have recognized in him’.8 Instead of power as a form of control by ‘someone else’, it is ‘tied’ to a certain ‘self-knowledge’ which reinforces, perpetuates and codifies the subject.9 Here, he emphasises power in its productive sense. Interestingly, however, he believes that by understanding subjectivity as a site of control and subordination, it also holds potential for ‘resistance’, arguing that power and ‘struggle’ are ‘reciprocal’ in nature, ‘a perpetual linking...reversal’.10 He adds that all resistance to power struggle against the fundamental question of ‘who are we’, or the subject-ness of the subject.11 In this sense, understanding the mechanisms, or the discourse which subjectify the individual reveal it to be a site for resistance against control and subsequently subordination.

In Gender Trouble, Butler builds on the Foucauldian understanding of subject with the hopes of what true sexual liberation would look like. They do this in their interrogation of sexual categories of ‘woman’ and ‘man’. In response to essentialism, which sought to define ‘woman’, they dispute this notion of ‘woman’ and how such engagement in creating definitions implicitly subordinate.12 The very definition of ‘woman’ marginalises, and by not challenging its assumptions, it would further entrench gendered realities of ‘man’ and ‘woman’, and harm the goals of sexual liberation. In a post-structuralist analysis on the binary of woman and man, for example, they point out how gender itself is revealed as not a fixed state of ‘being’ but ‘always a doing’.13 The creation of the gendered subject, such as ‘woman’, in this sense, is ‘performative’, they argue. It is through these codified set of behaviours which reinforce and reproduce the necessary realities which further enforce a distinction between ‘man’ and ‘woman’. An inclusive definition of ‘woman’ must not therefore necessarily emancipate ‘woman’, but merely change what is acceptable for ‘woman’ in relation to ‘man’. In pursuing such definitions, it engages with the very discourse that marginalises ‘woman’ in the first place. Butler argues that if sexual liberation is to occur, then challenging the whole discourse which takes for granted what a ‘man’ and ‘woman’ must take place.14 For Butler, just as Foucault would argue, the locus of power is in this ‘subjecthood’. If the discourse which assumes a distinction of gender and sex is not challenged, then it would merely privilege other gendered subjects over others, and not fully address gendered oppression. They contend that the expanding and challenging of gender categories and norms – or subjectivity of these gender categories – is therefore necessary within inherent in the project of sexual emancipation.

For post-structuralists, they relocate the locus of power and therefore its oppressive and productive forces within the concept of the subject. They argue that subjectivity is inherently a political problem because it is through discourse that subjects are defined, controlled and subordinated within power-relations. Emancipation, through this perspective they argue, can potentially lie in the expansion or challenging of discourse which create subjects and their marked distinctions, on what is ‘normal’ and what is aberrant.

FOOTNOTE

1 Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4(Summer, 1982): 779, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343197.

2 Ibid., 781.
3 Ibid., 777.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., 780.
7 Ibid., 778.
8 Ibid., 781.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., 794.
11 Ibid., 781.
12 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Taylor & Francis, 2002), 4-5.
13 Ibid., 33.
14 Ibid., 41; ibid., 43.

REFERENCES

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. London: Taylor & Francis, 2002.

Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (Summer, 1982): 777-95. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343197.