Ferguson: Of Our Normative Strivings

I’m still not entirely sure how this functions as methodology, but Foucault’s theorization of GOVERNMENTALITY, as elaborated by Ferguson, speaks to me more clearly than anything we have read this semester. I did not have to struggle with figuring out how it might apply to the study of the past, because that is what Ferguson does, in a way that is perfectly aligned with my project.

If industrial education is “alliance between sexual normativity and citizenship, a union…(refining) and (elaborating) power through twin processes of nationalization and normalization” (92), than what are social services, especially those that have young women “domesticating” other, slightly younger, but identified as troublesome young women? Are social provisions of the War on Poverty allocated in the service of creating more of what Ferguson would call model minorities, in the case of my study, the children of migrants?

For Ferguson, “part of the moral function of this new model minority…was to repair the damage that the Civil War did to the Confederate states, to the nation, and to the white heteropatriarchal family” (92). Discourses surrounding juvenile delinquency in the 1950s routinely lament the breakdown of the family during WWII, as fathers went off to war and mothers who had gone to work refused to return home to motherhood. (This ignores the economic realities of these families, but is still worth mentioning.)

If “industrial education facilitated not only the reformulation of African American subjectivity as the subject formation appropriate for the industrializing South but also repaired the white heteropatriarchal family” (93), what can be said about the economic contingencies of my time of study, and it’s relationship to the white heteropatriarchal family, and therefore the ways “potentially delinquent” girls and young women were approached by social work?

“As the case of the African American middle class illustrates, governmentality actually describes power’s activation through the constitution of agency rather than the abolition of it” (95). How is the agency of social workers and VISTA volunteers, and perhaps the reformed delinquents, being constituted in this process?

“In the gendered and sexualized context of nineteenth African American racial formations, governmentality was also about the production of things: here governmentality concerns not only the state but labor and industry as well. This new system of governmentality enlisted minoritized subjects as the new arrangers and producers of things. This new arrangement and production attempted to recuperate racialized heteropatriarchy in a general effort to restore the U.S. nation” (95). WHAT IF, in the late twentieth-century, a post-industrial age in which globalization is emerging, women are on the verge of sexual revolution, and soon to be rust-belt cities are experiencing another huge influx of migration—of both national and imperial subjects—governmentality itself shifts, perhaps still functioning to enlist subjects as the new arrangers and producers of things, but also to limit who can enlist, particularly young women, in another attempt to recuperate racialized heteropatriarchy?