SOSC 4352 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Surrogacy, Medical Abortion, Frankfurt School
4 Oct 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
September 27, 2018
SOSC 4355 – FEMINIST THEORY OF LAW:
Carol Smart – The Power of Law:
The Influence of Foucault:
• True, power and knowledge are central to this idea of feminism
• Power is seen as a commodity
o This can transfer or alienate wholly or partially through a legal act or through
some act that establishes a right
• Foucault rejects this idea and attempts to construct a non-economic analysis of power
that reflects the power in the 20th century
• Discipline – a closely linked grid of disciplinary coercions whose purpose is in fact to
assure the coercion of this same social body
• Mechanisms of power create resistances and local struggles, which operate to bring
about new forms of knowledge and resistance
• Power is productive, not simple negative sanction which stops or restricts oppositional
developments
• Although Foucault’s reconceptualization of power opens new ways of understanding, it
is very hard to abandon the old concept of power
• Foucault sees old power diminishing
• Think of power in the discourse of normalization and the discourse of rights
Truth/Knowledge:
• Refers to the ensemble of rules according to which the true and the false are separated
and specific effects of power attached to the true
• Foucault is interested in discovering how certain discourses claim to speak the truth and
can exercise power in society that values this notion of truth
• Welfare Principal: decisions about children tend to be based on the concept of welfare,
rather than traditional legal concepts of rights
o As a result, law now has the need to separate itself from social work
• If we accept law, like science, makes a claim to truth and that this is indivisible from the
exercise of power
• Law exercises power not only in simple material effects, but in its ability to disqualify
other knowledges and experiences
• Law turns everyday experiences into legal relevance’s
• Termjuridogenic: conceptualizing harm that law many generate as a consequence of its
operations
o E.g. the juridogenic potential of law
Summary:
• Old and new mechanisms of power
• Legal discourse is a significant mode of power
