Reading #5
Dcook-tulane.edu
AnthofBodyDocileBodies.pptxThe political Investment of the body
Focus on body as subject of power
What does power mean here?
Power is constituted through accepted forms of knowledge, scientific understanding and what is accepted as “truth”
Foucault argued we should not try to look for the center of power, or for the individuals, institutions or classes that rule, but should rather construct a “microphysics of power” that focuses on the multitude of loci of power spread throughout a society: families, workplaces, everyday practices, and marginal institutions
Institutions, schools, hospitals- sites of knowledge production work to constrain and DISCIPLINE the body
Michel Foucault , “Discipline and Punish” (1975)
“the body is involved in a political field: power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs” (p100)
Individuals are under constant surveillance and regulation in ways that are often subtle and thereby seemingly invisible, leading to normalization and acceptance of such systems.
The Disciplined Body
The Disciplined Body
The Surveilled Body- The Panopticon
New Orleans crime security cameras
Docile Bodies: “ one that may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved.”
- can only be achieved through strict regiment of disciplinary acts. “Discipline produces subjected and practised bodies, docile bodies.” (p.104)
Prison, schools, hospitals are sites where bodies are disciplined, surveilled , with a strategy of “mirco-physics of power”
The late 18th c Soldier emerges as a body that can be made “out of formless clay”
The Body at work
amazon factory worker testimony
“The body becomes a useful force only it is both a productive body and a subjected body. This subjection is not only obtained by the instruments of violence or ideology; it can also be direct, physical, pitting force against force, bearing on material elements, and yet without involving violence; it may be calculated, organized, technically thought out; it may be subtle, make use neither of weapons not of terror yet remain of a physical order.” (Foucault from Discipline and Punish, in ‘The Body A Reader p.100)
The Disciplined Body : Body Image
Sonya Renee Taylor:
If the body is a site of political investment and control, then reclaiming the body as a site of pleasure, love, and acceptance is a political act.
