“Cougardom” as Resistance: Using Michel Foucault’s Discipline Theory to Understand Identity Construction of Aging Women

• In Event: Roundtable Session 65
  In Roundtable Session: Applying Foucault to Qualitative Inquiry in Education: Looking at Resistance as Opportunity for New Knowledge

Abstract

Young girls look to older women in their lives to help them become proper ladies without even knowing they do so. Unfortunately, the only feedback they receive from this training comes when they fail to meet the standard for acceptable etiquette. Michel Foucault would describe these young ladies as both subjects and objects of disciplinary power, “in training” and in a constant state of identity construction and reconstruction as they position themselves within various relationships of power. While Foucault (1979/1975) agreed that the chief purpose of disciplinary power is training, his point was that discipline “makes” subjects from “the use of simple instruments; hierarchical observation, normalizing judgement and their combination in a procedure that is specific” (p.170).
But what happens when subjects buck against the acceptable rules of comportment? Foucault (1979/1975) wrote that the discipline comes in “pinning down each individual in his own particularity” (p.192), where difference marks individuals and banishes them to the “external frontier of the abnormal” (p. 183).
Such is the case for many women older than the age of forty choosing to engage in social and sexual relationships with significantly younger men. Referred to as “cougars,” these women are often placed in the stereotypical role of predator because they do not attain the normalizing, “’value-giving’ measure, the constraint of a conformity that must be achieved” (Foucault, 1979/1975, p. 183) for women. Flax (1993) wrote, generalizations about these women are made possible by discourse and within social practice “function to create and justify social organization and exclusion” (p.96). Walkerdine (1990) extended the argument, claiming individuals “can become powerful or powerless depending on the terms in which his/her subjectivity is constituted” (p. 5).
However, Foucault cautioned against describing power exclusively in negative terms. He encouraged a rethinking of what we think we know to embrace the idea that power produces reality, where there are possibilities to navigate within any system. Therefore, the question becomes, what are the possibilities of cougardom? How might being a cougar be empowering? What made this label possible, and finally, if everything is dangerous as Foucault wrote, where is the danger in naming women in this manner?
Judith Butler (1992) argued, “In a sense, what women signify has been taken for granted for too long, and what has been fixed as the ‘referent’ of the term has been “fixed,” normalized, immobilized, paralyzed in positions of subordination” (p.16). Using Michel Foucault’s Theory of Discipline to examine power relations in terms of cougardom, this paper troubles the complexity of identity construction for aging women in our society, seeking out points of resistance within the constituted experience of these women, looking for what Butler (1995) called the open “formations that are not fully constrained in advance” (p. 135). Describing these women as marginal is not enough. Using Foucault as a lens enables qualitative researchers to begin to locate opportunities of freedom for this woman, so we may begin to describe the many ways she may consciously act to create this lifestyle within her power structure.

Author

• Allisa Abraham Hall, University of Georgia