Reviewed by Christopher F. Zurn
University of Kentucky

Amy Allen’s compact, clearly written book aims to provide feminists with a theory of power that can integrate the insights and productive theoretical resources of previous accounts, while maintaining the capacity to comprehend and critically evaluate the multifarious, complex, and interconnected axes of stratification and oppression affecting women in contemporary Western societies. Her book starts from the thesis that feminism has three distinct interests in studying power that can provide desiderata for the adequacy of a feminist theory of power. We need to understand and critically evaluate the domination and subordination experienced by women (both as women and as multi-positioned subjects within the diverse axes of societies stratified by sexuality, race, and class), the power that women do exercise in self-transformative empowerment and in resistance to domination, and the power that women are able to exercise through collective action in feminist and other allied social movements. The basic strategy of the book is to work through the implicit and explicit theories of power deployed by other theorists, probing them for productive insights while diagnosing the sources of their one-sidedness, in order to offer an integrated theory of power that will allow feminists to grasp, and challenge, the complexities and interdependencies of diverse, pernicious exercises of power. Allen concludes with a tripartite analysis of power relations tailored to these three interests that distinguishes between power-over (the capacity of individuals or groups to constrain the choices of other individuals or groups), power-to (the ability of individuals to attain their ends), and power-with (the ability of collectivities to act together to attain some agreed-upon end).

The first chapter briefly reconstructs and critiques three models of power that have often been implicitly presupposed in feminist theories. The first model, which views power as a resource that is unequally distributed between men and women and seeks to redistribute power, is categorically rejected by Allen. She argues that because this model incorrectly takes power to be a thing, rather than a relation, and focuses on dyadic, static comparisons, it obscures structural power relations and misconceives domination in a way that portrays only state-sponsored protection of the resourceless as an adequate remedy. I hope that Allen considers these criticisms—and possible responses that can be made to them—at more length in the future for, if she is correct, then her contrasting account of power presents a serious challenge to mainstream social and political philosophy, much of which finds the resource model of power attractive and powerful, particularly when conceiving of adequate institutional (governmental, legal, economic, etc.) restructurings. The next two models of power—as domination and as empowerment—fare better according to Allen, since they are fundamentally relational and highlight socially significant gendered power differentials in both subordination and potential for transformative practices of care. However, both the domination and empowerment models of power are (in complementary ways) one-sided: in focusing on only one modality of power they tend to either demonize or valorize all power relations in a way that ignores countervailing ambiguities, and often leads to an essentialistic reduction of the differences among women.

What is needed, then, is an account that shows how it is possible to be both dominated and empowered, at the same time, in one and the same social practice. Allen finds this account largely in the work of Foucault and Butler. Chapters Two and Three are rather fine reconstructions and evaluations of these two theorists’ views, picking out their crucial insights, but not afraid to point out exactly where their accounts have shortcomings from the point of view of the diverse interests feminists have in power. I can’t do justice to the rich and thought-provoking content of these chapters here. Four crucial points standout, however. First, Allen shows how Foucault’s theories of power and subjectivity (especially in Discipline and Punish [1977] and The History of Sexuality, Volume One [1978]) highlight the dialectical interplay between power-over and power-to in all power relations, thus overcoming the one-sidedness of domination and empowerment accounts. "Power both constrains individuals by subjecting them to regulation, control, and normalization and, at the same time, enables or empowers individuals by positioning them as subjects who are endowed with the capacity to act" (51). Second, Allen argues that this very dialectical interplay leads Foucault (and the early Butler, e.g., in Gender Trouble [1990]) into a paradoxical account of agency: on the one hand it seems that subjects are rather deterministically constrained by the power networks they find themselves caught within and constituted by, yet, on the other hand, it seems that as subjects, whose very actions constitute relations of power, agents can easily escape the structural constraints of power. Allen’s compelling idea is that, by drawing on Derrida’s account of language, Butler (1993) has developed a way out of this paradoxical vacillation between determinism and voluntarism. According to Butler’s later theory of performativity, culturally encoded meanings need to be continually cited by social actors in order to maintain their efficacy; and yet, in this process, individuals can subversively intervene to resignify the dominant (and often oppressive) standard meanings. This ambiguous potential in the practice of citation mediates the problem of agency, since it shows how agents voluntarily reiterate meanings at the same time that the very meanings that they draw on, either in reiteration or resignification, are already determined by previous (hegemonic) citations. Third, Allen criticizes both Foucault and Butler for their unwillingness to explicate and ground the normative ideals that they implicitly draw upon in negatively assessing modern social practices and institutions: without such a framework of distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate, constraining and empowering social practices, their condemnations have the character of a performative self-contradiction. Fourth, because they focus only on strategic dimensions of power, neither Foucault nor Butler adequately addresses the kind of collective power-with that is made possible in consensual, collective action based upon relations of reciprocal intersubjectivity.

It is precisely for her account of solidarity and its frank normative endorsement of collective action that Allen turns to Arendt’s theory of political action (see especially Arendt 1958, Arendt 1963, and Arendt 1969). Since Arendt herself seems, in many of her views, to be no good friend of feminist theory, Allen aims to recuperate her crucial insights by mining her theoretical account of power-with, while minimizing the impact of unfruitful aspects of her work. After reviewing many of the similarities between Arendt, Foucault and Butler—the most important of which is their rejection of a juridical, command-obedience model of power in favor of a relational one which recognizes that power exists only in being actualized—Allen turns to two significant differences: Arendt’s embrace of a normative framework and her devaluation of the social and private realms, as well as any political action directed to these. While the first is seen as a welcome distinction from Foucault and Butler, the latter is more problematic for any feminism that takes seriously the importance of overturning androcentric, naturalized accounts of the rigid distinction between the public and the private. Allen recommends that we dispense with the metaphysical underpinnings of Arendt’s distinction between the political and other spheres, and instead define the domain of the political in terms of common, generalizable interests. This results in Arendt’s (useful) model of political solidarity: "political collectivities are bound together not by a shared essence or identity but by the promise to work together to attain certain political goals" (102). From this non-essentialistic account, Allen shows, in an acute argument, how Arendt avoids the putative dilemma of identity politics: either endorse the category of ‘women’ at the risk of excluding difference, or reject the category at the cost of loosing the ability to think about the ties that bind feminists together. Since all political action presupposes some amount of both equality and distinction among participants, Arendt recommends using ascribed identity categories (especially when they are the basis for persecution and subordination), while rejecting their basis in any essentialist, shared characteristics or experiences. The fourth chapter concludes that, although Arendt may have painted too optimistic a picture of (political) power and avoided analysis of power-over and power-to, her theory of power-with does not preclude developing such a theory along the lines taken by Foucault and Butler.

One of the most insightful claims of the book is that the tripartite account of power offers only analytic, not substantive, distinctions between ways of exercising power. Power-over, power-to, and power-with are not ontologically exclusive, for all three can be manifest in one and the same interaction or practice. The same holds for Allen’s normatively contentful distinctions between domination (power-over that works to the subject’s disadvantage), resistance (an individual’s power-to serving the end of overcoming domination), and solidarity (power-with serving the agreed-upon aim of overcoming domination). I worry, however, that Allen is a bit too sanguine about the possibilities of developing a defensible normative framework adequate to apparently conflicting requirements: consistent with Foucault and Butler’s account of power that appears to generate skepticism about the validity of norms, truth, and subjectivity; retaining Arendt’s strong moral universalism without her perfectionist account of the human condition; yet capable of grounding the kinds of evaluative distinctions we need between just and unjust, legitimate and illegitimate, empowering and oppressive relations of power. Allen ends the book with some suggestive methodological considerations for putting her theory of power to work. While the power exercised in specific relations and practices can be foregrounded, the more important work for a feminist theory of power is the analysis of the background social conditions that allow particular power relations to appear and that shape their valence and import. Here Allen suggests five different aspects of these social conditions: subject positions, cultural meanings, social practices, institutions, and structures (both manifest inequalities and generative patterns of asymmetry). I look forward to more of her work as she deepens her theory of the complex dimensions of and interrelations between these background conditions. For although her empirical observations throughout might obscure the fact, her theory of power does not foreclose analysis of those social and political institutions such as government, law, the economy, mass media, and expert cultures that have traditionally been the focus of theories of power.

The appeals I have made for further development of Allen’s theory should not overshadow the manifold virtues of this book: an insightful but not hagiographic reconstruction of Foucault’s theory of power; a careful, clear reading of Butler’s resolution of problems in that theory; an explicitly feminist rehabilitation of some of Arendt’s most germinal ideas; and, most of all, a powerful set of analytic lenses with which to view domination, resistance, and solidarity that does not obscure their complex, multifaceted interconnections.

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

____________. 1963. On Revolution. New York: Penguin.

____________. 1969. On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co.

Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.

____________. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." New York: Routledge.

Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage.