The Feminist's Misunderstanding Of Foucault's Subject Theory And Its Meaningfulness

Foucault is an all-round influential scholar in the humanity filed. The jointing-together of Foucault and Feminism should be considered as a unique achievement in philosophy and feminist study domain. As we know, feminists have done meticulous study in almost every part of Foucaudian theory; this is also where the so-called "Foucauldian Feminism" came from. We have to admit that there are a lot of original and inspiring points in their research at this point, but we also have to accept that these original points are accompanied by almost the same amount of misreading—Feminism Misreading of Foucaudian Theory. A very important point held in this paper is that the Foucauldian theory of subject is where the archeology of knowledge, study of discipline and study of sexuality go in the end. And the feminism misreading of Foucault can also be attributed to the misreading of his Subject theory. So the Foucauldian subject theory can be a good starting-point to clarify the misreading here. So what proved necessary here is to respond to the misreading mentioned above in a Foucauldian manner. All the feminism misreading and misunderstanding of Foucaudian subject theory can be categorized into the following three groups:1,The critique of lack of Initiative and chance of being free of Foucauldian subject2,The critique of genderlessness of Foucauldian Subject and patriarchism of the Foucauldian theoretic background3,The critique of the not-going-with-each-other of Foucauldian theory of subject and feminism theoretical and political goalAs I believed, if the mentioned three points can be responded rightly and effectively, all the challenges (from feminists towards Foucault) about Foucauldian subject theory, knowledge theory and so on will be solved satisfactorily. These three critiques are the most important points of the challenges given by the relational feminists from theoretical and political viewpoints. After my arguments here in the main part of this paper, you will see that none of the three critiques is raised reasonably. As I will point out, actually they resulted from their insufficient understanding of Foucault and their embedding in the classical feminism theory. I will point it out that the three points mentioned above are not reasonable and feminist scholars can apply Foucauldian theory into their research as much as possible. At the same time, I will put the misreading mentioned here into the "normal" category. But what for me is important and worth inquiring is the meaningfulness lying beneath it.