Gender, power, and historical memory: Discourses of serrano resistance

Some recent writing on power has been concerned with displacing an essentialist and reified notion of the stateand with formulating an alternative, expanded conception of the political.1 Focusing on the question of how rule is accomplished, much of this work has been influenced by Antonio Gramsci's notion of the state as "political society + civil society, in other words, hegemony protected by the armor of coercion,"2 by Foucault's stress on power's "capillary form of existence,"3 and by the feminist notion of the personal as political. Rather than seeing rule as resting on interdictions, the exercise of power is viewed as productive-of meanings, truths, bodies, selves, in short, of forms of doing, knowing, and being. Meaning becomes located in discursive practices produced, contested, and transformed in sociohistoricalaction rather than in a sui generis scheme of timeless categories.