Focusing on Foucault's work on “infamous men” and the “dangerous individual,” this chapter argues that there are other instances in Foucault's oeuvre in which he is similarly insensitive to violence against women, although these cases have drawn less critical attention. The two‐fold aim of the chapter is, first, to examine what is at stake for Foucault in his writings on infamous men and dangerous individuals whose infamy and dangerousness involved violence against women, and, second, to problematize Foucault's failure to attend (...) to gendered power relations in these texts. Foucault's most sustained consideration of a monomania diagnosis concerns the case of Pierre Rivière. The chapter argues that some of the aspects of existence that Foucault fails to see in his dogged focus on what he reads as agonistic medical‐iegal battles and power relations between men include the family, gender relations, the victimization of women and children, suffering, and love. (shrink)

: The article shows that Michel Foucault's account of the sexual body is not a naïve return to a prediscursive body, nor does it amount to discourse reductionism and to the exclusion of experience, as some feminists have argued. Instead, Foucault's idea of bodies and pleasures as a possibility of the counterattack against normalizing power presupposes an experiential understanding of the body. The experiential body can become a locus of resistance because it is the possibility of an unpredictable event.

The article shows that Michel Foucault's account of the sexual body is not a naive return to a prediscursive body, nor does it amount to discourse reductionism and to the exclusion of experience, as some feminists have argued. Instead, Foucault's idea of bodies and pleasures as a possibility of the counterattack against normalizing power presupposes an experiential understanding of the body. The experiential body can become a locus of resistance because it is the possibility of an unpredictable event.