The scary part is this actually made sense to me on the first reading, it’s funny mostly because it is an incredibly out of place piece of prose. The article until this point is very conversationally written. Also, frankly the “awkward” invocation of Nietzsche is priceless.
Rather the gendered subject emerges through a regulatory scheme of gender--we are literally brought into being as gendered subjects through gender regulation. From this perspective, the very idea of a regulatory “apparatus” appears as a kind of structuralist Althusserian hangover clouding the Foucaltian insight into the radical reach of subject production through regulatory discourse. In Foucault’s understanding of the power that circulates through the subject of regulation, there can be no actual apparatus because there is no sharp distinction between what is produced and what is regulating--we are not simply targets but vehicles of power? Thus to paraphrase Nietzsche awkwardly, we must be able to conceive regulation without the regulator, to understand regulation as only and always materializing in its effects, and to understand these effects as specific to that which is being regulated.
from: Brown, W. (1997) The impossibility of women’s studies. differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 9(3).