Sex, Violence and Crime

Foucault and the 'Man' Question

Adrian Howe

• Publisher: Routledge-Cavendish
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135331047
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Jura
• Subtopic: Rechtstheorie & -praxis

What happens when you sex violent crimes? More specifically, what happens when you make men's violence against women the subject of a conversation or the focus of scholarly attention? The short answer is: all hell breaks loose. Adrian Howe explores some of the ways in which this persistent and pervasive form of violence has been named and unnamed as a significant social problem in western countries over the past four decades. Addressing what she calls the 'Man' question-so named because it pays attention to the discursive place occupied, or more usually vacated, by men in accounts of their violence against women-she explores what happens when that violence is placed on the criminological and political agenda.

Written in a theoretically-informed yet accessible style, Sex, Violence and Crime-Foucault and the 'Man' Question provides a novel and highly original approach to questions of sex and violence in contemporary western society. Directed at criminologists, students and, more widely, at anyone interested in these issues, it challenges readers to come to grips with postmodern feminist reconceptualisations of the fraught relationship between sex, violence and crime in order to better combat men's violence against women and children.

Chapter 1
Let’s talk about sex, baby

At the bottom of the page she had written … BEWARE OF FOUCAULT, as if the philosopher was a particularly savage dog.¹

‘The best orgasm of your life!’, ‘How to reach orgasm every single time!’, ‘When it’s ok to fake it’. For more than three decades now, articles in women’s magazines have urged young women to discover (or, more precisely, perform) heterosexual sexual bliss. But sex advice columns do much more than that. By reproducing a mode of very familiar sex talk, they enable us to listen—courtesy of a feminist adaptation of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony—to the sounds of hegemonic heterosexism clanking into gear. The neverending stream of advice to young women on how to be properly sexed, sexual and prepped to please their man also supplies a rich body of material for breaching—courtesy of Foucault—the self-evidence of ‘sex’. Indeed, magazines like Cosmopolitan, Cleo or She cry out for Foucauldian discourse analysis; that is, for testing Foucault’s famous assertion in volume 1 of his History of Sexuality that what matters, when it comes to sex, is not ‘whether one says yes or no to sex’, or ‘whether one formulates prohibitions or permissions, whether one asserts its importance or denies its effects, or whether one refines the words one uses to designate it’. What matters is to account for the fact that sex is spoken about and to discover:

… who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions which prompt people to speak about it and which store and distribute the things that are said. What is at issue, briefly, is the over-all ‘discursive fact’, the way in which sex is ‘put into discourse’.²

What matters, in short, is how sex is talked about. For Foucault and Foucauldians, sex—and by extension, violence and crime—are first and foremost discursive practices. It follows that checking how sex, violence and crime are ‘put into discourse’ is this book’s method of choice for planting them firmly in a postmodern frame.

Some caveats before we begin. This book does not have space to explore the development of what has been called, after Foucault, the ‘postmodernisation’ or denaturalisation of sex.³ Engaging with the massive body of ‘prosex thought’ inspired by Foucault’s three-volume history of sexuality is simply beyond its reach.⁴ Nor can we spare the time to get immersed in the equally voluminous feminist debates for and against the deployment of his ideas for feminist ends.⁵ My more minimalist goal is to create a usable Foucault, a Foucault amenable to anyone interested in forging a critical understanding of sex and sexed violence. Naturally, the first question that springs to mind is: how much sex do we need for that? Some may say they cannot get enough, but we need enough to grasp Foucault’s reconceptualisation of sexuality as a discursively constituted event involving a technology or technique of the self.⁶ And we need enough to comprehend what Rosalind Coward meant when she declared that every manifestation of sexual activity, including male aggression, far from being ‘natural’, is a ‘ritualistic enactment of cultural meanings about sex’. Sex, she said, is ‘never instinctual’ – sex is ‘always an activity wrapped in cultural meanings, cultural prescriptions and cultural constraints’.⁷ Drawing on these insights, Chapter 1 takes the first small steps needed to inculcate a postmodern feminist sensibility around questions of sex in order to lay the groundwork for the challenges made to non-feminist perspectives on men’s violence against women in the next three chapters. It also aims to disabuse readers of the notion that ‘Radical feminism is feminism’ as non-feminists appear to assume is still the case today.⁸

The coming of soul-less sex

Let us begin with an illuminating early twenty-first century magazine discussion of ‘modern’ sex. The October 2003 British edition of Cosmopolitan sets itself apart from the madding crowd of glossy women’s magazines that have urged young women, in issue after issue, onto better and better heterosexual sex. Remembering the (undisclosed) time of her ‘first proper boyfriend’, a time when she and her girlfriends ‘relished our newfound sexual power’, the editor—a self-declared ‘modern-day feminist’ – reflects on the ‘new worrying trend’ she calls ‘Soul-less Sex’. While ‘soul-less sex’ is not defined in the editorial, it soon becomes apparent that it is code for the recent much-publicised spectacle of young English women drinking themselves into comas, acquiring sexual transmitted diseases at alarmingly high rates in the process, and topping the European teenage pregnancy scales at a rate of two, three and six times more than their Italian, French and German counterparts respectively.⁹ The editor blames these worrying new trends on ‘soul-less sex’, which is ‘the opposite’ of the ‘open approach to female sexuality’ that the editor had enjoyed when she was younger, which if one can guess from her photograph was some 10 years earlier. Back then, she says:

We didn’t feel ashamed about one-night stands, we didn’t judge each other and we weren’t embarrassed by our enjoyment of sex. This, we thought, is what feminism is all about.

Moreover, it was magazines like Cosmo that had ‘helped make this proud sexuality possible’:

Along with millions of other women, we felt able to expect satisfying sex. We didn’t always get it, but we knew we deserved it (unlike our mothers and grandmothers).

Now something had gone awry. Feminism was supposed to mean ‘more choices in all areas of our lives’. The arrival of soul-less sex, however, was a headache for the editor of ‘the only magazine that gives women open and entertaining sexual advice’. Certainly, the behaviour of young women obsessed with sex with men they did not know which had caught the British media’s attention was worrying, but not – she assures us—because she had an issue with ‘the number of men a woman chooses to bed’. The problem was rather that young women ‘feel they must be part of this new trend’; that they ‘feel pressured because suddenly sex is the cool, fashionable thing to do’.¹⁰

Our worried Cosmo editor taps into a question that has been posed by feminist analysts for some time now—just how sexually liberating for women is all this magazine sex talk? Have all the hints on how to have seamless orgasmic sex ‘every single time’ failed to live up to their promise? One view is that magazines aimed at young women should not be admonished for trying to turn their readers into ‘passive clones of male desire’, because ‘if you actually take the trouble to read magazines like Cleo, Cosmo or Dolly, you get a very different picture’.¹¹ Well, do you? In this chapter, I do take the trouble to read the magazines. I also take up the challenge of taming the savage dog—the challenge of rendering Foucault’s frequently difficult, sometimes convoluted, and occasionally circular theories about the power of discourses less scary to the uninitiated. We will pick up more methodological clues from Foucault for studying the power of discourse in Chapter 3. Here we are concerned with developing a Foucauldian reading of discourses about sex—predominantly sex as in having sex. Finally, a brief reference to sex as in having a sex will serve as a reminder of just how complex ‘sex’ is.

Sex and method—taming the beast

Some readers might prefer to bypass questions of method in order to get straight down to business—the business of sex. It may be a matter of indifference to them that Foucault wrote a great deal about methodology, as well as about sexuality. No doubt they will be relieved to learn that as this book is not a methodological tract, it will not be delving into the detail of Foucault’s notes on method. Nor will it get side-tracked by the extensive literature assessing his history of sexuality. As already mentioned, the heated debates between his feminist admirers and detractors, between those who have followed and those who have adamantly declined to follow any of the Foucauldian paths are not our concern here either.¹² Instead, this chapter explores reading strategies for those interested in taking what is sometimes called ‘the postmodern turn’.

Expanding on the question of terminological confusion between postmodernism and poststructuralism that was raised in the introduction, let us begin with a discussion of these terms that takes place within a criminology text. According to Maggie Wykes, criminology has experienced a ‘critical turn’ that ‘blended feminism with post-modernism, particularly with the post-structural philosophical aspects of post-modernism’. She sees this distinction between postmodernism and poststructuralist theories as crucial inasmuch as ‘post-modern critique’, in her view, ‘merely celebrates a frivolous kind of dismissal of all attempts to account for change in the world’. Poststructuralism, on the other hand, challenges objective truth because it recognises that power is imbricated in the production of truth; that regimes of truth are forged from a ‘will to power’. Such an understanding, she says, is ‘epitomised’ by Foucault’s work.¹³ That Foucault himself not only refused this label, but insisted that he did not know what the terms ‘postmodernism’, ‘structuralism’ or ‘poststructuralism’ meant, is of no consequence.¹⁴ What is pertinent however, is that a clear exposition of poststructuralism and of how Foucault’s work fits the description, can be found in Chris Weedon’s ground-breaking book advocating the usefulness of poststructuralist theory for feminist practice.

Poststructuralism, Weedon explains, is the name given to theoretical positions developed from the work of Derrida, Lacan, Kristeva, Althusser and Foucault. Its ‘founding insight’ is that ‘language, far from reflecting an already given social reality, constitutes social reality for us’. This ‘insight’, as she calls it, is the very heart of the matter, the key to unlocking the postmodern door. Discourses give the world meaning; they do not simply translate a given or ‘fixed reality’. For example, what it means to be a woman, or a man, is not constant, fixed, essential or eternal. Rather, ‘the meanings of femininity and masculinity’ vary across time and between cultures. But while all poststructuralist theories agree on this point—that ‘meaning is constituted within language’ rather than being a given—different forms of poststructuralism theorise the production of meaning in different ways. Derridean deconstruction, for example, looks at the relationships between different texts. In Weedon’s view, however, it is Foucauldian theory, with its analytical focus on historically specific discursive relations and social practices, that is ‘of most interest to feminists’.¹⁵

Discourse, it should be made clear from the start, is not interchangeable with ‘language’. A ‘critical concept’ that refuses the ‘supposed given unity of particular domains of knowledge’, ‘discourse’ has been defined as ‘a system of language, objects and practices’, one that ‘implies a practice both of speech and action; who, it asks, speaks on a particular object or event and when, where and how?’.¹⁶ Discursive practices can be economic, social and political. As Weedon explains, Foucault used the concept of ‘discursive field’ to explore the relationship between language, social institutions, subjectivity and power. Discursive fields consist of ‘competing ways of giving meaning to the world and of organising social institutions and processes’. Law, the political system, the church, the family, the education system and the media are all located in a particular discursive field. Within each field, some discourses support the status quo, while others contest it, and are consequently ‘dismissed by the hegemonic system of meanings and practices as irrelevant or bad’. This is the fate, for example, of dissenting discourses such as feminism that seek to challenge dominant or ‘hegemonic’ discourses.¹⁷

What is distinctive about Foucault’s approach is his linking of discourse and power and his emphasis on the social and institutional effects of discourse, especially its role in ‘the constitution and government of individual subjects’ – that is, of who we are. Power, he argued, was exercised on individuals not only through institutions such as psychiatry and the penal system, but also via ‘the discursive production and control of sexuality’. It followed that the analytical focus should be on the discursive fields which constitute madness, or punishment of sexuality. The aim in each case is to ‘uncover the particular regimes of power and knowledge at work in a society and their part in the overall production and maintenance of existing power relations’. Discourses are crucial to Foucault in the establishment of regimes of truth because, as Weedon explains, they are ‘ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations which inhere in such knowledges and the relations between them’. But discourses are ‘more than ways of thinking and producing meaning’. They also constitute:

… the ‘nature’ of the body, unconscious and conscious mind and emotional life of the subjects they seek to govern. Neither the body nor thought and feelings have meaning outside their discursive articulation, but the ways in which discourse constitutes the minds and bodies of individuals is always part of a wider network of power relations, often with institutional bases.¹⁸

In short, discourses are powerful, some much more than others, as we shall see. For now, Foucault gets the last word on the power of discourse—discourse, he said, is ‘the power to be seized’.¹⁹

Sex, discourse and the power of truth

As it happens, sex is a very good place to start discussing the method that Foucault himself referred to, at least on one occasion, as ‘discourse analysis’, a method that treats discourse not as ‘a set of lin...