The politics and gender of truth-telling in Foucault’s lectures on parrhesia

I just think there’s this…certain assumption that…when a man tells the truth, it’s the truth. And when, as a woman, I go to tell the truth, I feel like I have to negotiate the way I’ll be perceived. Like I feel like there’s always the suspicion around a woman’s truth, the idea that you’re exaggerating…There’s this whole fear that I’m gonna have finally fucking have stepped to the plate and told the truth and someone’s going to say…Uh, I don’t think so.

– Kathleen Hanna, in The Punk Singer.

I think it truly was a misunderstanding…I really don’t think that there was any intent on your part to get this girl home so you could have sex with her whether she wanted to or not…You are kind of an open book right now…and you have been since I talked to you on [the phone four days earlier]…It says a lot for your character that you came in and sat and talked to me this morning…I really don’t believe you had any intent to hurt anybody.

– A female police officer talking to a man accused of sexual assault, quoted in Jon Krakauer’s Missoula.

Abstract

This essay challenges dominant interpretations of Foucault’s lectures on parrhesia as affirming an ethical, non-political conception of truth-telling. I read the lectures instead as depicting truth-telling as an always political predicament: of having to appear distant from power (to achieve credibility), while also having to partake in some sense of political power (to render one’s truth significant). Read in this way, Foucault’s lectures help us to understand and address the disputed politicality of truth-telling – over who counts as a truth-teller, and what counts as the truth – that his ethical interpreters tend to neglect. Yet the essay also shows that Foucault’s depiction of the predicament of truth-tellers is problematically gendered: focused on the masculine problem of moving in and out of the public sphere, rather than on the experience of the dispossessed, who are excluded from political power altogether. The essay mobilizes an alternative reading of one of Foucault’s key texts – Euripides’ Ion – to draw out an alternative, more democratic model of the predicament of truth-telling: of having to constitute power that can lend significant to truth-telling, while speaking from a position of powerlessness.