In his works on distribution and exercise of power, renowned French philosopher

Michel Foucault paved way to the discussions about dominations faced by female that

indirectly shapes the view of female body as it is viewed in our so-called patriarchal

society.

There is broad agreement that Foucault's redefinition of how we think about power in

contemporary societies contains important insights for feminism. Foucault’s idea that

the body and sexuality are cultural constructs rather than natural phenomena has made

a significant contribution to the feminist critique of essentialism. Drawing on the

traditional model of power as repression, many types of feminist theory have assumed

that the oppression of women can be explained by patriarchal social structures that

secure the power of men over women. Foucault criticizes previous analyses of power

(primarily Marxist and Freudian) for assuming that power is fundamentally

repressive, a belief that he terms the “repressive hypothesis”. Foucault endeavors to

offer a “micro-physics” of modern power, an analysis that focuses not on the

concentration of power in the hands of the sovereign or the state, but instead on how

power flows through the capillaries of the social body. Although Foucault does not

deny that power sometimes functions repressively, he maintains that it is primarily

productive; as he puts it, “power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of

objects and rituals of truth”.

It should come as no surprise that so many feminists have drawn on Foucault's

analysis of power. On the basis of Foucault's understanding of power as exercised

rather than possessed, as circulating throughout the social body rather than emanating

from the top down, and as productive rather than repressive (Sawicki 1988: 164),

feminists have sought to challenge accounts of gender relations which emphasize

domination and victimization so as to move towards a more textured understanding of

the role of power in women's lives. Foucault’s redefinition of power has made a

significant and varied contribution to this project. 

Several of the most prominent Foucaultian-feminist analyses of power draw on his

account of disciplinary power in order to critically analyze normative femininity.

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault analyzes the disciplinary practices that were

developed in prisons, schools, and factories in the 18th century — including minute

regulations of bodily movements, obsessively detailed time schedules, and

surveillance techniques — and how these practices shape the bodies of prisoners,

students and workers into docile bodies (1977, 135–169). In her highly influential

essay, Sandra Bartky criticizes Foucault for failing to notice that disciplinary practices

are gendered and that, through such gendered discipline, women's bodies are rendered

more docile than the bodies of men (1990, 65). Drawing on and extending Foucault's

account of disciplinary power, Bartky analyzes the disciplinary practices that

engender specifically feminine docile bodies — including dieting practices,

limitations on gestures and mobility, and bodily ornamentation. With respect to

gendered disciplinary practices such as dieting, restricting one's movement so as to

avoid taking up too much space, and keeping one's body properly hairless, attired,

ornamented and made up, Bartky observes “it is women themselves who practice this

discipline on and against their own bodies…. The woman who checks her make-up

half a dozen times a day to see if her foundation has caked or her mascara run, who

worries that the wind or rain may spoil her hairdo, who looks frequently to see if her

stocking have bagged at the ankle, or who, feeling fat, monitors everything she eats,

has become, just as surely as the inmate in the Panopticon, a self-policing subject, a

self committed to relentless self-surveillance. This self-surveillance is a form of

obedience to patriarchy” (1990, 80).

Henceforth, as a corollary to Foucault’s works on power distribution, we can think of

the image of female body in our today’s society is also dominated by the deep

influence from mighty “male”-viewpoint.