Abstract: This article will claim that although masculine domination is no longer a norm, it is still normalized by apparatuses powered by knowledge and desire. The analysis is focused on the normalization of masculine domination in family therapy. The article claims that, although masculine domination is no longer a norm, family therapy often normalizes gender inequalities by reshaping them into a matter for private negotiation. Building on that, the article discusses the problem if a feminist therapy can intervene in such situations without normalizing masculine domination and without producing a series of problematic effects.
Keywords: normalization, narrative therapy, family therapy, masculine domination, conflict
Masculine domination was more than a norm of the modern family. It was considered normal, and it was constituted as normal by the silent operation of apparatuses ranging from police to pedagogy, psychiatry or public hygiene. This article will claim that although masculine domination is no longer a norm, it is still normalized by apparatuses powered by knowledge and desire. The discussion will focus on a somewhat distant heir of psychiatry, family therapy. As the argument is based on a specific concept of normalization, I will start by summarizing it. In the second section, I will discuss normalization in the case of a British couple that tried to work out its conflict with the help of a narrative therapist. In the final section, I will look into the problem if a feminist narrative therapy can provide an alternative to the normalization of masculine domination.
1. Normation and Normalization
The concept of normalization has been developed by Michel Foucault in his lectures on modern apparatuses of security (2007). As it is crucial to the argument of this article, I will quote Foucault's definition, and I will summarize its main features on the basis of a hypothetical case.
We have then a system that is, I believe, exactly the opposite of the one we have seen with the disciplines. In the disciplines one started from a norm, and it was in relation to the training carried out with reference to the norm that the normal could be distinguished from the abnormal. Here, instead, we have a plotting of the normal and the abnormal, of different curves of normality, and the operation of normalization consists in establishing an interplay between these different distributions of normality and [in] acting to bring the most unfavorable in line with the more favorable. … The normal comes first and the norm is deduced from it, or the norm is fixed and plays its operational role on the basis of this study of normalities. So, I would say that what is involved here is no longer normation, but rather normalization in the strict sense. (Foucault, 2007: 91)
Imagine a husband that normally does not give any money to his wife. What does normally mean?
Saying that this is normal implies not only that it is the case but also, firstly, that it has been the case for some time, and therefore it refers to an accumulation of cases in time. Secondly, 'normally' suggests that what has been happening is the same notwithstanding the differences between the individual events, the changing circumstances, the flow of time. Thirdly, “normally” indicates what is to be expected, what is probable. Yet to say that something is normal does not mean that it is always the case, that nothing else happens. Perhaps the husband is generous to the wife on occasion, yet as long as such fortunate occasions are not normal, they are less probable, less recurrent, perhaps even singular, they are outweighed by the mass of the cases in which the husband controls the money. Fourthly, describing such a situation as normal implies that it is not a crisis. The difference between a normal situation and a crisis however is not qualitative but quantitative, crises are also probable, although less, hence the line that separates them from normality should be conceived of as a threshold rather than as an opposition. Fifthly, since a normal situation is an aggregate of past cases making a certain future development more probable than its alternatives, in order to transform it one needs to change the probability distribution by accumulating time and alternative cases. Imagine for example that a hypothetical public official intervenes in favour of the wife. If she would try to oblige the husband to share the income, then she should police the family, and as the family will still be subject to the gravity of the past, the official will soon need to punish the husband which can easily escalate into a family crisis. The official will be more successful in changing the normal situation without provoking a crisis, if she manages to provide an independent source of income to the woman, or if she finds a way to stimulate the husband to share or to relinquish his control over the money. Finally, in view of the implications summarized above, the normal is irreducible to a norm: a norm prescribes what has to be the case, it proscribes the acts that transgress it, and it entails an opposition between the prescribed and the proscribed; in contrast, saying that something is normal involves a description of a mass of cases, a prediction of high probability, and a threshold separating it from a crisis. Since the implications of the normal are different, it does not coincide with the norm, it can be more or less close to the norm, and in that sense it opens up a margin for fluctuations, a space of divergence from the norm (Donzelot, 1997: 211).
Building on this concept of the normal, one can tentatively define normalization along the following lines: it does not mean to impose a norm, to sanction the deviations from the norm, to prevent or punish the transgressions; to normalize means to make normal, to associate a case with an aggregate of similar cases, to calculate probabilities, to allow for fluctuations around the norm instead of sanctioning deviations, to control the fluctuations so that they do not cross the threshold of crisis, to intervene not by directives or punishment but rather by increasing the probability of a normal development and by reducing the probability of the crisis.
At the turn of the 20th century, without challenging the normative status of masculine domination, doctors, hygienists, teachers, priests, psychiatrists, the police normalized it in the sense outlined above: as normal family life inevitably deviated from the norms, they intervened to contain its fluctuations within the limits of acceptable risks, below the threshold of crisis (Rose, 1999: 234–240; Donzelot, 1997: 227–228). In the next section of this article I will concentrate on the normalization of masculine domination in family therapy. I will claim that, although masculine domination is no longer a norm, family therapy often normalizes gender inequalities by reshaping them into a matter for private negotiation. In order to demonstrate that, I will analyze the case of a British couple described by a renowned narrative therapist, Martin Payne (2006: 188–90).
2. A Normalized Family
Su, Chinese, comes to the United Kingdom to study in a small college in Northern England. At the college, she develops a strong interest in feminism. Richard is a professor at the college. They fall in love, Richard leaves his teaching position, and they open together a Chinese restaurant, probably the first in town. Richard manages the restaurant, while Su is in charge of the kitchen. About a year later Richard leaves Su, but soon comes back. After that, Su often talks about leaving him, but never takes a step. After five years of marriage, they end up at the office of a narrative therapist.
Narrative therapy emerged in the 1980s under the influence of Michel Foucault and Jeremy Bruner (1990) whose postmodern narrative theory had just reached the zenith of its popularity (Payne, 2006: 18–24, 31–36). The basic assumption of narrative therapy is that we are constituted as subjects by discourses amalgamating knowledge and power. Yet subjectivation is never perfect, it unavoidably gives a residue that we are trying to explain by telling stories about what went wrong with our lives, why we are not the subjects that we are supposed to be, how come we are not true to ourselves as subjects, for what reasons we are not the subject that we truly are. If the stories about our deficiencies cross a certain threshold of intensity, if they come to define us, then they start limiting our potential instead of fostering personal development, and we become dysfunctional selves. Narrative therapists are usually trying to repair such dysfunctional stories by questioning the discourses on which they are based. Thus, the therapy is often focused on gender stereotypes, racial discrimination, social inequalities. The therapeutic goal is to articulate a positive story capable of reconstituting the clients as autonomous subjects open to personal growth, willing and able to develop further their potential, flexible enough not to break up under the pressure of problems that will inevitably come with the future. However, one of the most important advantages of narrative therapy consists in the fact that it rarely takes more than fifteen sessions, and in the 1990s such relatively short and therefore cheap therapies became widely popular among the insurance companies trying to lower the costs of their operation (Broskowski, 1995).[1]
Richard tells the therapist that Su does not show warm feelings towards him, and their intimate life has cooled so considerably that it actually froze; moreover, Su is distracted which impairs her efficiency in the kitchen; and she is distracted because she is in love with the chef, also a Chinese national; Richard however believes that the chef is only exploiting her feelings in order to get an extension of his work visa; so the chef is not actually in love, he will surely break Su’s heart and Richard would have long ago fired him to protect her if it were not so difficult to find a good Chinese chef in Northern England; so currently Richard has no option, but he is doing his best to control his anger. While Richard is speaking, Su is crying. After she manages to calm down, she explains that the efficiency of the restaurant is reduced because Richard drinks too much and because he is constantly yelling at the staff; Su does not deny that she has fallen in love with the chef, but she cannot help it because the chef is listening to her, while Richard is still acting as a teacher; and their intimacy is frozen because she wants a child and Richard does not.
When both are done telling their stories, the therapist asks them to define their problem. To do that, Su and Richard need to abstract an invariant from the varying reasons, circumstances and outcomes of their conflicts. With the help of the therapist, the clients settle on “the increasing gap between us” (Payne 2006, 188). From the perspective of this abstract problem, the conflicts fade into an undifferentiated mass of reiterations of the same. Then the therapist explains that many couples run into similar problems at a certain period of their marriage, so although Su and Richard experience their situation as a crack-up, it is actually quite normal; yet if they fail to act, they will probably split up, or worse, suffer through their life together. As it would not make sense to condemn or prohibit them from quarreling, the therapist tries to reduce the probability of conflicts. To that end, he tries to alienate their dysfunctional stories, to discover ideas, desires, dreams deviating from what they normally think and feel about each other, to help them develop such alternative ideas or desires into a positive story about their relationship. To alienate Richard from the story about Su’s weakness and irresponsibility, the therapist explains to him that his anger is overdetermined by the gender stereotypes according to which to be a man means to be strong, to be able to make decisions, to be in control. As Richard recognizes the stereotype and makes a confession that it has indeed affected his idea of masculinity, the therapist makes an effort to convince him that a moment of weakness does not make one weak, and that a man of really strong character can negotiate or make compromises without compromising his dominant position in the family. In the course of the discussion, the therapist comes to realize that the English and the Chinese cultures have different thresholds of rudeness: as the first one is noticeably higher, Richard believes that he has never actually yelled at Su or at the kitchen staff, he was merely being rational, he was criticizing them with the intention to help them improve their work, to correct obvious defects and to develop further their potential. In hope to alienate Su from her story about the destructive effects of Richard’s anger, the therapist explains to her that the behaviour she perceives as yelling counts as criticism in British culture, hence the narrative about Richard’s anger is actually overdetermined by the Chinese cultural stereotypes of politeness. In effect, Su and Richard start to recognize that their stories are shaped by the interplay of external, social forces, and in that sense the conflict between them is already successfully alienated. Now the therapist starts to work on finding out alternative ideas and desires. He asks Richard why he came back after he left Su. Richard explains that he cared about Su and wanted to protect her. Then the therapist asks Su why she has never broken up with Richard although she periodically threatened to leave him. Su has already mentioned that she has no money because Richard maintains full control on their income, and that she is not actually paid for her work at the restaurant. Yet the lack of money does not explain sufficiently why she did not ask help from the chef, or why she did not turn to a non-governmental organization offering support to women who are trying to emancipate from their husbands; and since this is not a positive story, the therapist encourages Su to look for other reasons to stay with Richard. Su makes a confession that deep inside she still hopes that one day her life with Richard might improve, perhaps they can even fall in love with each other again. Now the diverging thoughts and feelings that can provide the foundation of the positive story are identified and the therapist starts to build on them. With his assistance, the couple develops the narrative that they have always cared for each other despite the gender and cultural stereotypes that drive them apart. To be able to change the situation however, the narrative needs to acquire a gravitational mass, to absorb a multiplicity of events and time. To that end, the therapist asks both clients to make a commitment to show that they care for the other. Richard gives Su a promise that he is going to be less critical. Su makes a promise that she is going to keep more distance from the chef. Since indefinite quantities like 'less criticism' or 'more distance' are small, perhaps even petty as the happenings that form the flesh of everyday life, since such quantities are fleeting, local, situated, their meaning can be defined only by Richard and Su in the context of the particular situations they are finding themselves in. To decide on such indefinite quantities and hence to determine the threshold of the acceptable behaviour, Su and Richard need to negotiate them between themselves. But then they are no longer helpless, no longer overwhelmed with the affects triggered by the other, they are capable of choosing, evaluating, deciding, they are empowered.
Indeed, after a couple of sessions the therapist identifies the first signs of defusing the crisis: instead of focusing on their conflict, instead of searching for a solution, Su and Richard get distracted and talk about work or daily chores; as they are no longer searching for a solution, concludes the therapist, they do not need one, therefore the conflict has been resolved, they are on the path of becoming a normal family. As if to confirm the conclusion, after six months the couple revisits the therapist. As it turns out, Richard has fired the chef, he still controls the money, perhaps he yells less, and Su is more performative in the restaurant's kitchen. The unequal distribution of power and capital in the family is intact yet, since Richard is now negotiating with Su, since Su is no longer powerless, his dominant position has become acceptable. So, both declare that their relationship has improved by 65% (it is worth noting that in the course of the therapy they learned to represent their life in percentages and probabilities). They even give to the therapist a letter written, as it seems, by the sensitive Su herself:
We have […] gone from a really desperate situation to one where there is real hope for the future. Everyday things get better! That can’t really be put into words. (Payne, 2006: 190)
I am afraid that the gleam of hope provided by narrative therapy has made the couple blind to the domination that structures the reality of their life. Hope is power, but if the power of hope is channeled in this way, it can hardly achieve more than a shaky happy consciousness – “a thin surface over fear, frustration and disgust” (Marcuse, 1964: 80).
In the next section, I will discuss the problem if a feminist therapy can intervene in such situations without normalizing masculine domination and without producing a series of problematic effects. To that end, I will apply to the case of Richard and Su the protocol of feminist therapy described by Barbara Forisha (2001: 249–250).
3. A Revolution of Desire
What if Su and Richard chose feminist therapy?
As feminist therapy is a heterogeneous and burgeoning field, let us imagine that they start visiting a therapist who is following the approach described by Barbara Forisha (2001; although such an approach is not necessarily representative of the field, I believe it represents a problem that any feminist therapist needs to take into account).[2]
The hypothetical feminist therapist would not make an attempt to inscribe in a positive story the fact that Richard controls the money. She would rather insist that the case of Su is similar to a mass of cases of domestic oppression, and that in many cases such an oppression through dispossession escalates into violence (see for example Taylor and Miller, 1994: 85). However, the feminist therapist would claim that Su is entitled to a share of the family income, and if she wants to reduce the probability of a violent crisis, she has to stand up to Richard and fight for her rights. In effect, the therapist will be advising a domestic revolution. The revolution however will amount to nothing, just as Su’s college interest in feminism, if she does not feel a burning desire for emancipation. Yet one cannot simply prescribe emancipation. To change her situation, the desire for emancipation needs to acquire enough gravitational mass to make independent conduct no less probable than Su’s normal behaviour, and in that sense the therapist has to normalize the desire. Hence the therapist will work to alienate the desires that make Su submissive to Richard, to identify an alternative desire and to invent a procedure by which the latter can accumulate into a mass of iterative, indistinguishable everyday events. To that end, the therapist will foster Su’s awareness about her real self by advising her to discover an autonomous desire, a desire of her own, for example to study, to work, to make a fresh start. Then the therapist will try to encourage Su to accept that self-awareness by alienating the desires that she has internalized from her family, probably by working out an appropriate variation of the formula “It is not okay to want only what you want, it is okay to want what I want” (Forisha, 2001: 249). If I am allowed to speculate, the therapist will advise Su to forget about the chef and to abandon most decisively the desire to have a child with Richard because both involve a commitment to men and because they imply or at least do not reject masculine domination. Moreover, since such desires can only undermine Su’s autonomy, they have to be exteriorized in a manner structurally similar to the exorcism of negative life stories in narrative therapy. In the next phase of the therapy, the therapist will work to strengthen Su’s self-acceptance by generalizing her autonomous desire into a desire for autonomy. For that purpose, the therapist will guide Su to realize that patriarchy is not natural, that it is built on violence and dispossession while stimulating her anger against masculine domination. Then the sessions will focus on channelling the energy of anger so as to help Su reclaim her agency. The therapist will try to make Su understand that an autonomous desire is meaningless if she fails to act. However, as her desire is alienated from the desire of the husband, she has to be ready to abandon the certainty and the safety of the familiar, to take risks. In the concluding phase of the therapy Su should become aware that, as the society is still patriarchal, it will inevitably impose constraints on her desire and limit her autonomy. Because of that, the risks she is going to take in her fight for emancipation are going to come at a price that she, if her desire for autonomy is authentic, should accept without expecting anyone else to cover it. Then, in the final phase of the therapy, Su has to learn to take responsibility both for her autonomous desire and for the risks she takes and their costs as well and to accept her limited autonomy. If the therapy is successful, at the end Su will be constituted as an autonomous and responsible agent.
Such a hypothetical, perhaps ideal feminist therapy certainly challenges masculine domination as a norm. Nevertheless, it normalizes masculine domination because it represents the individual cases of female suffering as a series of variations of an invariant oppression, and it is precisely because of this that the therapist is able to calculate probabilities, to define the threshold of unacceptable risks, to intervene in hope to prevent a crisis. Of course, such a normalization does not hide a surreptitious normativity. It would be quite unconvincing to claim that feminist therapy treats masculine domination as if it has to be the case. On the contrary, feminist therapy insists that it should not be the case, yet that normative claim is based on an account of masculine domination as a normal situation. I think that this brings about a series of problematic side-effects. Firstly, the therapy liberates Su by a kind of secular exorcism since it alienates the social forces that put her under pressure, and objectifies them as a solid, immutable social order that imposes limitations, poses risks, incurs costs. In effect, the therapy reifies masculine domination while challenging it, perhaps even in order to challenge it. Of course, that does not mean that masculine domination is not a thing, that it is produced, perhaps even invented by such a therapeutic reification. On the contrary, precisely because it is real, quite like the real objects of a phobia or of a paranoid projection, masculine domination performs additional functions in therapy: to associate suffering with a cause that is objective and therefore external to the subject; to constitute a subject whose freedom from or at least control over suffering is guaranteed by the opposition, distance, detachment from the cause of suffering. Such therapeutic functions of the recognition of masculine domination have a problematic side-effect since they turn masculine domination into a necessary support for desire as they educate women like Su to see through their demands an abstract desire for autonomy from the oppressive social order and hence teaches them to justify their demands by reference to oppression, by the rift that separates them from the oppressors. Secondly, therapy constitutes Su as a subject of responsibility as she is supposed to develop an awareness that, as long as she is an autonomous agent who makes autonomous choices, she is responsible for her choices and therefore for the risks they involve, for the suffering they can lead to. In effect, the therapy places on Su the cost of the risks entailed in her emancipation; and since at the same time the therapy associates the risks with the limiting social order, it redistributes the risks, absolving the society of responsibility (indeed, how can Su claim that the society is responsible for the trail of damage left by the risks she took, if she is an autonomous agent and the risks have been an effect of her choices).[3] Thirdly, the therapy represents desire for autonomy as the truth about Su and therefore it constitutes Su as a subject of desire, a subject who is truly herself as long as she remains true to her desire. Such a regime of subjectivation shares the problems described by Michel Foucault in the context of the repressive hypothesis of sexuality (1978). Moreover, it involves a pedagogy of desire that teaches Su to abstract herself from the interplay of social and psychological forces shaping the landscape of her life instead of acting on them; and is not Su's autonomous self, which she already learns how to renounce in the course of finding it, anything more than a thin surface over her anxiety and frustration? Finally, feminist therapy, as many other forms of therapy, is fuelled by secondary narcissism in the sense of investment of desire in a self that is improved or empowered by purification from the anxieties and pressures of everyday life (Adorno, 1994: 72–74, 164). Even though such a secondary narcissism can have an emancipatory potential, it is based on a lonely desire developed through alienation from the desires of the others. In effect, the autonomous self, constituted by such a narcissistic desire unavoidably, although always as if by an accident, ends up being a lonely self.
To conclude, I believe that a truly emancipatory feminist politics should invent a form of emancipation that does not represent masculine domination as a distribution of normalized probabilities (associated with risks, thresholds of danger and techniques of intervention), does not channel desire into veridiction, does not privatize risk and does not rest on loneliness. Therapy is unable to do that because, even if it is feminist, it relies on modes of conceptualization and techniques of intervention shaped by client-centred approaches or family therapy, and calculated to alienate, reify, exorcise suffering, to conquer the unhappy consciousness of women (Marcuse, 1964: 59–86). Until feminist therapy develops concepts and techniques of its own, it can achieve nothing more than to make suffering liveable, bearable, swallowable. A feminism worthy of its promise, of its utopian impulse, should be a revolution, even in therapy.[4]
References
Adorno, Theodor. 1994. The Stars Down to Earth. London: Routledge.
Broskowski, Anthony. 1995. “The Evolution of Health Care: Implications for the Training and Careers of Psychologists”. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 26: 156–162.
Bruner, Jeremy. 1990. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Donzelot, Jacques. 1979. The Policing of Families. New York: Pantheon.
Forisha, Barbara. 2001. “Feminist Psychotherapy”. In: Corsini, Raymond (ed.) Handbook of Innovative Therapies. New York: Wiley, 242–254.
Foucault, Michel. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. The Will to Knowledge. New York: Pantheon.
Hare-Mustin, Rachel. 1978. “A Feminist Approach to Family Therapy”. Family Processes, 17: 181–194.
Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One-Dimensional Man. New York: Beacon Press.
Murphy, Megan. 2017. “Feminist Couple Therapy”. In: Reiter, Michael and Ronald Chenail (eds.) Constructivist, Critical, and Integrative Approaches to Couples Counseling. London and New York: Taylor and Francis, 46–75.
Payne, Michael. 2006. Narrative Therapy: An Introduction for Counsellors. London: SAGE.
Rose, Nikolas. 1999. Governing the Soul: The Shaping of Private Self. London and New York: Free Association Books.
Taylor, Anita and Judy Miller. 1994. Gender and Conflict. Minneapolis: Hampton Press
Vaisova, Lea. 2022. Study of the Needs of the Organizations Working on Women, Girls and Vulnerable Groups’ Rights in Bulgaria. Sofia: Bulgarian Fund for Women (accessed 20 October 2022).
[1] For a wider picture on the economic and societal pressures on the therapists working with victims of domestic abuse see Vaisova, 2022.
[2] I am using this approach because Barbara Forisha wrote a chapter in a handbook intended to summarize the most popular protocols of the therapeutic approaches at the turn of the century, and because she is discussing the comparable case of Juanita (Forisha, 2001: 251–252). For a more recent review that attenuates but does not discard the protocol described by Forisha see (Murphy, 2017).
[3] Although the constitution of a subject responsible for the risks entailed by her choices can be associated with neoliberalism, the problem of responsibilization is much broader (see for example Rose, 1999: xxiii), and as the contemporary forms of conservatism has abundantly demonstrated, the opposition to neoliberalism can easily lead not only to emancipation but also to even more oppressive regimes of responsibilization.
[4] Feminist therapy started as a revolution inside the American Psychological Association (see for example Hare-Mustin 1978), but it seems that in the following decades it's revolutionary potential has been limited by the need to adapt to the highly competitive milieu of therapy.
Biographical note
Todor Hristov teaches theory of literature at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”. His research interests are in the field of critical theory, popular culture studies, biopolitics and governmentality.
Email: todor_hristov[at]gbg.bg
