What does Foucault mean by docile body?
What Can it Help us Understand? Foucault’s concept of docile bodies illuminates the sense that bodies must be positioned receptively in order for logics of arrangement to act upon them. Furthermore, he constructs bodily processes and operations as the object of applications of power.
What does Foucault say in discipline and punish?
Discipline and Punish is a history of the modern penal system. Foucault seeks to analyze punishment in its social context, and to examine how changing power relations affected punishment. They proposed a theater of punishment, in which a complex system of representations and signs was displayed publicly.
What are the four main features of docile bodies?
Discipline creates individuality out of the bodies that it controls. It is cellular, organic and genetic. It has four techniques: it draws up tables, it prescribes movements, it imposes exercises and arranges tactics.
What does discipline mean in Foucault’s theory?
power
Discipline for Foucault is a type of power, a modality for its exercise. It comprises a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets. This type of power forms a body of knowledge about the individuals it disciplines, rather than the deployment of visible signs of sovereignty.
What do you understand by docile bodies?
Docility occurs when a group of people are so used to being watched continuously that their discipline becomes internalized and they no longer have the capacity to resist. When people enter into this state, they become docile bodies.
What are docile bodies?
Abstract. docile bodies expresses how systems of power enforce docility on women’s bodies. The choreographic work uses the medium of the moving body to present observation as a method of discipline and represent the bodily limitations of feminine gender performativity.
Why does discipline require enclosure?
Discipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself. It is the protected place of disciplinary monotony. There was the great ‘confinement’ of vagabonds and paupers; there were other more discreet, but insidious and effective ones.
What does Foucault say about bodies?
Foucault says that the body is ‘directly involved in a political field’ that 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’ (Foucault 1995: 25).
Who is the author of discipline and punish?
Discipline and Punish was written by Michael Foucault and published in 1975.
How is discipline related to the use of the body?
In the correct use of the body, nothing must remain useless. four) Body-object articulation. Discipline defines each of the relationships between body and the object (e.g. a rifle) it manipulates. five) Exhaustive use. The traditional timetable forbids men to waste time.
What does Foucault say about the docile body?
In this chapter, Foucault explicates systems of discipline that produce docile bodies. Foucault argues that the emergency of discipline in the classical age “discovered the body as object and target of power” (136), renewing interest in the maintenance, control, and commodification of the body.
What are the two main images of discipline?
There are two images of discipline: one) the discipline blockade—an exceptional enclosed space on the edge of society; and two) the discipline-mechanism—a functional mechanism to make power operate more efficiently. The move from one to the other represents the formation in the seventeenth and eighteenth century of a disciplinary society.
