governmentality together, however, he oVers an important theoretical and empir-
ical corrective to the more one-sided and/or essentialist analyses of Marxist state
theory and to the taken-for-grantedness of the state that infuses neostatism. But his
work remains vulnerable to the charge that it tends to reduce power to a set of
universally applicable power technologies (whether panoptic surveillance or
disciplinary normalization) and to ignore how class and patriarchal relations
shape the state’s deployment of these powers as well as the more general exercise
of power in the wider society. It also neglects the continued importance of law,
constitutionalized violence, and bureaucracy for the modern state. Moreover,
whatever the merits of drawing attention to the ubiquity of power, his work
provided little account of the bases of resistance (bar an alleged ‘‘plebeian’’ spirit
of revolt). More recent Foucauldian studies have tried to overcome these
limitations and to address the complex strategic and structural character of the
state apparatus and statecraft and the conditions that enable the state to engage in
eVective action across many social domains.
6 Feminist Approaches
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While feminists have elaborated distinctive theories of the gendering of social
relations and provide powerful critiques of malestream political philosophy and
political theory, they have generally been less interested in developing a general
feminist theory of the state. In part this reXects their interest in other concepts that
are more appropriate to a feminist theoretical and political agenda and their
concern to break with the phallocratic concerns of malestream theory (Allen
1990 ; MacKinnon 1989 ). The main exception in theWrst wave of postwar state
theorizing was Marxist–feminist analyses of the interaction of class and gender in
structuring states, state intervention, and state power in ways that reproduce both
capitalism and patriarchy. Other currents called for serious analysis of the state
because of its centrality to women’s lives (e.g. Brown 1992 ). This is reXected in
various theories about diVerent aspects of the state (Knutilla and Kubik 2001
compare feminist with classical and other state theories).
Some radical feminist theories simply argued that, whatever their apparent
diVerences, all states are expressions of patriarchy or phallocracy. Other feminists
tried to derive the necessary form and/or functions of the patriarchal state from the
imperatives of reproduction (rather than production), from the changing forms
of patriarchal domination, from the gendered nature of household labor in the
‘‘domestic’’ mode of production, and so on. Such work denies any autonomy or
state and state-building 121