Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline & punish (part 3: “Discipline”). New York: Vintage.
Foucault, M. (1978). History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (part 4: “The deployment of sexuality”). New York: Vintage.
Jette, S. (2006). Fit for two? A critical discourse analysis of Oxygen fitness magazine. Sociology of Sport Journal, 23, 331-351.
This week’s readings on Foucauldian Theory are dense and complex and I will do my best to touch on and summarize the key ideas covered. Written in 1975 Foucault’s Discipline & Punish is very much about the changes in power that were seen through the prison system and it focuses on the control of the body through different kinds of power.
Docile Bodies starts off by looking at the evolution of the bodies of soldiers where the docile body was one which could be “subjected, used, transformed, and improved” (p.136). Foucault looked at the scale of the control of the individual body, at the object of the control through exercise, and at modality where the body is controlled through time, space and movement. These controls of the body are what Foucault considered to be the “disciplines” and were considered a way to “master” individual bodies. The rise of factories showed the importance of distributing individuals in space and time in order to supervise them, and the control of activity became an important concept so that the coding of the body and controlling of time were possible.
In The Means of Correct Training Foucault demonstrated the importance of observation in the exercise of power. We were introduced to the “gaze” that could “see everything constantly” (p.173) and the idea that factories need intense continuous supervision. As we have seen in previous weeks’ readings, time, under capitalism, is strictly regulated as any loss of time can result in lost capital – therefore “surveillance becomes a decisive economic operator both as an internal part of the production machinery and as a specific mechanism in the disciplinary power” (p.l75). Disciplinary power, along with being everywhere and always alert, must also be corrective. This is where the idea of “normalization” comes in as an instrument of power that imposes homogeneity and that can punish individuals who deviate from the “norm” (we also see the idea of the “abnormal” here). Individuals undergo examinations, in hospitals/ schools/ barracks/ and workshops to determine these norms which then become used as reference points.
In Panopticism Foucault starts off by looking at the strict spatial partitioning that was enforced during the plague, and we see how the idea of the “central gaze” was prominent – people needed to be accounted for and had to appear in windows while a centrally located inspector did visual roll-calls. This leads us to the introduction of Bentham’s Panopticon – the architectural figure that we now relate to certain prison systems that is also all about a central gaze and the control of space. The main idea of the Panopticon is that of centralized and (in)visible power. There is a central circular tower that everyone (e.g., prison inmates) can see, and from which everyone can be seen, and it is impossible to tell by looking at the tower who is inside or where they might be looking (“he is seen but does not see” p.200). This gives the impression of generalized surveillance where visibility is a “trap” and forces individuals to “self-monitor” and to exert control over their own behaviours.
Being very personally interested in the control of bodies, I found it really helpful to go back to this primary text and to see the context in which Foucault is basing a lot of his ideas. Having been exposed to Bentham’s Panopticon, and knowing how prominent this architectural theory still is (e.g., the Kingston Penitentiary down the street was built around this concept), it was really great to see how this idea can create a niche for the regulation of bodies outside of prisons. How often do we “self-monitor” our own bodies, by deciding what to eat (and imagining the “consequences” of “bad” foods) and when to exercise, in order to maintain the bodily norms that are so prominent in our capitalist consumer society and which are exploited by the media and advertising industries? Can we imagine a body that is not an object and target of power, a body that isn’t manipulated and shaped, a body that doesn’t obey or conform to the norm?
In the History of Sexuality Foucault starts by looking at the prohibitions on sexuality in the seventeenth century and the change to more relaxed views of sexuality in the twentieth century. By highlighting some important historical moments Foucault shows the emergence of a new “technology of sex” at the end of the eighteenth century that made sex a concern of the state and required individuals to place their bodies under surveillance. We can see connections to Foucaults “Discipline” here, as the technology of sex was regulated by medicine, normality and the problem of life and illness: “The medicine of perversions and the programs of eugenics were the two great innovations in the technology of sex of the second half of the nineteenth century” (p.118).
Foucault questions the repressive hypothesis and shows that the history of sexuality was less about repression and more about class dominance. He looks at the control over the mind and body by the bourgeoisie, first over themselves, and then over the proletariat. If repression had only been trying to increase capitalist production then young men and the working classes would have been the “most repressed”, but Foucault shows us that the bourgeoisie were more interested in their own sexualities and in the “purity” of their family lines. Here we see how ideas of pure bloodlines could have “created” an opening for eugenics as the bourgeoisie “placed its hopes for the future in sex… as the bourgeoisie’s ‘blood’ was its sex” (p.124). Foucault shows us that the bourgeoisie considered their own sex as important and fragile, as an affirmation of the self and the body which allowed the working class to escape the “deployment” of sexuality (though still being subjected to the “alliances” (e.g., the exploitation of legitimate marriage and fertility, p. 121)). Sexuality is thought to have been deployed on the working class slowly, through the problems of birth control, the ideas of family, the control of the perversions, and finally, the control of the body and sexuality through constant surveillance. Foucault finishes by connecting psychoanalysis to the dissolution of the “taboos” of sexuality and by stating that the changes in sexual behaviour represented nothing more than a shift in the deployment of sexuality.
Seeing some of the contexts in which sexuality has been socially constructed gave me some good insights into how sexuality might continue to evolve and change over our lifetimes. We’re already seeing the deinstitutionalization of power, and like Foucault suggested, power seems to be everywhere and nowhere. However, we are still placing an incredible amount of “trust” in medicine and in science, and were reminded how female sexuality especially was regulated and controlled. It seems as though we are in a medicalization epidemic, trying to label everything as (ab)normal in order to control and regulate (female) sexuality. This is something I would be interested in discussing in a broader context – what are some ways we might link this regulation to some of our other weeks’ topics?
In Fit for Two Shannon Jette examines Foucaults notions of power and discourse surrounding “fit” pregnant female bodies by looking at six consecutive colums of the “Fit for Two” from Oxygen Magazine in early 2005. She looks at the notion of self-management of risk and the idea of individual (female) responsibility of health that suggests pregnant women are responsible for guaranteeing a healthy population. She uses Foucault’s ideas of discipline and the model of panopticism to show how women are encouraged to self-regulate and discipline their bodies, through ideas of medicalization and healthism, to reach the feminine bodily “norm”. Jette suggests that this regulation of pregnant bodies shows that the female body remains a site of control and her analysis aims to “recognize the complex nature of power” (p.338). By looking at personal responsibility, moderate exercise as responsible exercise, expert advice and consumer culture, and the “yummy mummy” Jette shows how medical expertise and (female) body norms are used to turn the pregnant body into a “fit” body through both self discipline and consumption.
I found it fascinating to see Foucaults work applied in such a practical application in this analysis. Jette challenged the idea that individuals choose how to wear their bodies, and made it apparent that stigma might surround a pregnant body that didn’t conform to the “norm”. I also found it interesting that the idea of “training for labour” came up a few times – did anyone else connect this to Hargreaves or Inghams articles on the sporting body? Do we think that by “training” for something, by imposing self discipline through practice and exercise, pregnant women will feel more in control of their bodies and be more likely to participate in the process of consuming whichever products are marketed to help them increase this feeling of control?
We can see the connection between the “moderate”, “conservative” exercise that is promoted in the fitness magazine and the idea from another weeks’ readings that women should have “weak” bodies – that women’s bodies are more “at risk” then the bodies of men. Seeing how medical discourse has drastically changed, from promoting bed rest and very little physical activity while pregnant to this idea of moderate consistent exercise, do we think that one day pregnant bodies might be encouraged to participate in strenuous exercise? It’s interesting how “scientific” norms can change… when they are advertised as being concrete and all knowing…
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To start, good job Nat. I enjoyed this week’s readings more than I thought I would, having read both of the Foucault readings in the past. I enjoyed them this time around mostly because I’m more comfortable with Foucauldian theory in general. I especially enjoyed Discipline and Punish and feel that it reads better than The History of Sexuality. Perhaps I feel this way because Discipline and Punish is grounded in empirical examples a little more, whereas The History of Sexuality deals more in abstraction? Or perhaps it’s because of the subject matter, sexuality being a concept not as easily grasped (for me)? I don’t know.
Anyways, Nat posed a few interesting questions about the self-disciplined body, and the frequency of the self-monitoring of our bodies. I too thought about this while reading and think that self-monitoring of the body is a constant process. The bathroom in my apartment came with a full-length mirror beside the shower, a stupid place for a full-length mirror. While I would like to think that I’m the type of person who doesn’t buy into normalizing discourses about the body, I still look at myself in that mirror every day, suck in my gut, and think about how I deviate from images of the “perfect” body. Too much info? Anyways, when Nat asks if we can imagine a body that is not the object and target of power, I tend to think that a body cannot exist outside of the disciplinary processes of self-regulation, an idea that Foucault deals with in The History of Sexuality (p. 96-96) One thing that I would like to talk about in class is Foucault’s idea of “gratification-punishment” and rewards. (Discipline p. 180-183) I think Foucault underplays this concept and that gratification in training plays a larger role in the process of discipline than he would have us believe. If there was no reward for going to school, would we even go to school? We don’t go to be disciplined, or to be punished. We go to school to excel at something, to be rewarded for our knowledge.
Like Nat, I found Jette’s article on the pregnant body interesting because of its practical application of Foucauldian theory. However, it brought up some issues that I feel are important, like what is good or bad about power and self-discipline? Jette’s main points are that there is a continued medicalization of the pregnant body in relation to the issue of exercise, medical discourses now emphasize the risk of not exercising, and women’s health remains a form of biopower and women’s fitness part of the apparatus of govermentality. She sees the sudden popularity of consumer products that push the image of a “fit mother” as technologies of governance that help discipline the pregnant body. The question of what is bad about discourses of health when the end goal seems to be a healthy mom and healthy baby comes to mind. It seems that Jette is critical of the promotion of a “normal” pregnant body, but she is also critical that these images don’t reach pregnant women who cannot afford to participate, women who cannot afford to purchase the magazines or commit time to exercise. So, is this bad or good? Is Jette criticizing the health discourses themselves, the method of their distribution, or simply the continued production of the idea that there is a “normal” female body type?
Firstly, I completely agree with Marty that Discipline and Punish was much more accessible and clear (and I have the opposite bias, always being more comfortable talking about sex).
I think Marty’s example of school is an interesting one. Partially because I think it draws attention to how we may have conflated reward and punishment to the point where we cannot always tell the difference. I would say that I did come to Queen’s because I was looking for punishment/failure, I looked forward to the challenge from being beaten out of my A-student standing into a B or even C student standing, and what I thought I could learn from no longer being the top of the class. To me the punishment was the reward.
Reading Discipline and Punish, with the internalized control of bodies, along side Periodization which spoke to eugenics and blood of sex, followed by Jette’s article addressing a reprosexual control, reminded me of something my first year history professor said that I have never been able to trace back to a primary source. I was told in this class that Foucault was an AIDS denialist. Can anyone trace this back to a source for me? I’ve tried the basic search functions and come up empty.
Anyway, I was reminded of this because of Foucault’s references to the plague (p. 195-200). In his discussions of special relations I thought of the explosion of controversy when it was proposed that the gay bathhouses be shut down in the 1980s. What are the present mechanisms of control in HIV/AIDS and how do they fit in with Foucault’s understanding of discursive power? Not notifying partners now has precedence in case law for juridical punishment, behaviours that render people at risk of HIV as well as members of the populations associated with those behaviours are marginalized, the cost of ARVs in punitive, etc. Unless anyone knows of what Foucault actually said about HIV, he did die with it after all, what can we posit he might say about HIV?
Another question that I have been wrestling with for a few classes has been: If we agree with Foucault that there is not one group/person with power who wields it to harm another person/group, but instead a network that we are all participating in through the creation, enforcement, consumption and acceptance of discourses of knowledge, how do we rebel? I like Foucault’s writing because the way he lays out the sequences of events that get us to where we are makes sense to me. However, I don’t want to stop with how we got here, I want to know how we get elsewhere. I suspect the answer is something to the effect of creating/presenting ‘competing discourses’/’cognitive dissonance’ but that feels a little intellectually masturbatory, does anyone have any other thoughts?
What better example of controlled space and time than the gym! With its rows upon rows of machines partitioned by more machines, that have to be signed out (managed time). In terms of the panoptic gaze, picture the office in ‘burn after reading’ (GREAT MOVIE), the walls are glass, there is no hiding, they are watching over the gym. The group exercise setting, or exercise class is also a great example of how space and time is controlled. The participants usually stand in rows, owning their own space. Time is divided into warm up, X, and cool down and small amounts of time are allotted for various exercisers (a lot of counting goes on).
I find it very interesting that within the same disciplined body (my own) there is also resistance. I have two competing voices. I conform and work hard on trying to keep my body ‘in shape’ but I also possess a strong and informed critique of body image and women’s fitness practices. I think this is a good thing, resistance within the same body/individual that is being controlled by the institution of fitness, might lead to fitness discourses and control being reorganized (deployed in a different way). I have an example of how ‘power’ reorganizes and responds to shifts in discourse.
DOVE’s Campaign for Real Beauty. Dove (like many fitness magazines) has jumped on the ‘Body Image Distortion’(BID) bandwagon, actively and energetically informing the masses of the distorted body image that most young women/girls ‘have’. Along with anorexia and bulimia most of the population’s women now suffer from a new medicalized disorder, BID. The campaign features women who do not fit the size, age, and racial stereotypes usually seen in popular media, yet all of the women who are featured are still very attractive in my opinion. I have not seen any stretch marks or cellulite, just women who more acuratley represent real life (I guess that’s a start?). But my point is how the deployment of ‘beauty’ and ‘body image’ has adjusted to the growing critique of the industry to suit its own purpose of making profits. Don’t forget, Dove sells beauty products, soaps, creams, hair stuff. This also reminds me of the whole ‘natural beauty’ trend, to achieve this natural look you need the right make up, the right techniques for applications, really there is nothing ‘natural’ about it!
My point is, that Oxygen magazine is a business, it is not a free community publication. You see changes and sometimes straight out contradictions in the diet and exercise guidelines provided by governments. For example, not long ago, if you wanted to experience the health benefits of regular exercise you were advised that this exercise had to be fairly high intensity; walking or playing with your kid didn’t cut it. However that didn’t work, most people were not receptive to that exercise prescription because it was very demanding. What happened, well they changed it, they adjusted it in order to achieve its objective of getting Canadians more active. Now daily activities like walking and playing with your kids etc. do cut it! And guess what, instead of having to workout for 30 minute sessions, it is now acceptable to exercise in ten minute sessions. (another example is the health measurement of BMI versus waist circumference.)
Scientific norms can change and still be credible because of our investment in the ‘expert’ and the medical field. Jette cites research on page 332 that “…, available data are insufficient for inferring important risks or benefits for either the mother or infant”. I probably am going to sound extremely cynical, but I think it is all bull! By publishing information that claims to make for a healthier baby and pregnancy, that privileges those that have access and money to acquire this knowledge works in conjunction with healthism. What kind of mother to be would not want the latest info for a healthy pregnancy, baby and self? An irresponsible one? Nobody wants to feel like a bad or neglectful mother before they have even had their kid! The fact that it is a monthly column means new/different info has to be sought out all the time. To me, this undermines the credibility and usefulness of the information as new recommendations are not reported as they are discovered but in a contrived way. I wonder how different info in the Fit for Two columns can be month to month
I also would like to echo what a concise job Nat did of summarizing this dense block of Foucaultian theory.
Every time I read Foucault I’m beyond intrigued at how he ties whatever discourse he is on at the time to its evolution through history. Last time, the way power and control was manifest through various mechanisms such as patriarchy, Christianity, sexuality and clinical medicine; this time his analysis refers to power and control of the body evolving from the soldier phenotype to docile bodies that come to be self disciplined to a politically constructed normative ideal.
After reading Marty’s wonderful anecdote about checking himself out in his shower side full-length mirror and unconsciously judging himself against the normative “perfect body,” I am reminded of another example from my favorite anecdote bank, Bravos Emmy award winning drama ‘Mad Men.’
In the first episode of the series, the new secretary Peggy is being shown around the incredibly patriarchal and misogynistic Madison Ave. advertising office by the head secretary Joan, who herself is a voluptuous woman, a master at objectifying herself and feeding into the patriarchal normative standards of femininity. Judging Peggy’s conservative clothing and body at the end of the tour, Joan emphasizes how much impact Peggy’s appearance will have on her job. She suggests that Peggy go home, put a bag over her head with eye holes cut out, undress in front of a mirror and “honestly assess where all her strengths and weakness are” so she can work on them. No class would be complete without another Mad Men reference to suit the social discussion de jour!
Not only does this example show a cultural impetus for the discipline and control of docile bodies, but it also speaks to the supervision and distribution of individuals in space and time. New to this office environment Peggy is placed at a secretarial desk for one of the managers where she is under the constant supervision and criticism of Joan the head secretary who patrols the office isles. The women there all look and dress the same; their bodies are all subject to a normative ideal for working in that environment.
To respond to Nat’s question of whether we can imagine a body that is not the object and target of power, I agree with Marty and Foucault that a body cannot exist outside of the disciplinary processes of self-regulation. Even if it is not being adequately regulated to the norm, it is subject to that scrutiny by society. We see it everywhere: in Oxygen magazine for pregnant mothers, in Marty’s bathroom and even in Mad Men.
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