Foucault’s Docile Body
Michel Foucault’s, “Docile Bodies”, contained in his larger work, Discipline and Punish, astutely proposes the concept that the systems and processes that we as a society create and even manufacture have developed a certain power to shape, form, and manipulate the human body—thus, creating what Foucault calls the “docile body”. He argues that through the movement from viewing the body as a whole (“wholesale”) to breaking it into many levels of usefulness (“retail”), an incredible amount of power over the body was accomplished. He defends that the optimization of every feature, motion and process of the body is dictated by the objects that prevent the body from performing more creative (and inefficient) movements and tasks. Through the breaking down of tasks into ever more specialized and precisely prescribed movements, creativity vanishes and we become limited by our own creations. The docile body can be shaped, formed, and manipulated into a disciplined and submissive state of efficiency.
Foucault defends his claim through examples of how both the views and usefulness of the body—within secondary education, followed by hospitals, and eventually soldiers in the military—have been altered throughout the course of history. He discusses the involvement of religious education in this sequence—that it demanded attention to detail. Foucault uses an illustration of the progression of the born soldier into the modern soldier whose body is disciplined to stand erect with shoulders back and head looking straight ahead. Foucault’s argument stems from the idea that, among other things, it is the form of the wall that the soldiers are forced to stand against that trains their slouching bodies to stand and hold thems...
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Foucault, Michael. “Docile Bodies.” The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Print.
"Hunting." American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2003. Credo Reference. Web. 10 April 2011.
Paulson, Nels. Sustainable hunting: The production of governable space through global civil society. Diss. Arizona State University, 2009. Dissertations & Theses: Full Text, ProQuest. Web. 2 Apr. 2011.
Swan, James A. In Defense of Hunting. New York: Harper Collins, 1995. Print.
“Sport.” New Oxford American Dictionary. 2009.
United States of America. Colorado Department of Natural Resources. Department of Wildlife. Regulations. 07 Apr. 2011. Web. 18 Apr. 2011. .
In a most literal sense men’s bodies were routinely exploited for unrelenting dangerous labor then discarded as the human body began to break. Instead of being reward...
The writings of Foucault, Bartky, Butler, and Bordo are significantly separate from each other in the issues that they grapple with within the body of their texts but their also overlap on major points, as is to be expected when many people write on the same subject. Each of these writers is concerned with different aspects of power and how that power is used and how it operates within our society. Most of these writers are feminist theorists and concerned with the ways that the female body is affected by power used against her while Foucault is less concerned with how power affects female bodies specifically but that can be seen as a result of his lack of connection to feminist thought. If Foucault mentions women and how they are affected
...easily controls and manipulates the way individuals behave. Although there are no true discourses about what is normal or abnormal to do in society, people understand and believe these discourses to be true or false, and that way they are manipulated by powers. This sexual science is a form of disciplinary control that imprisons and keeps society under surveillance. It makes people feel someone is looking at them and internally become subjective to the rules and power of society. This is really the problem of living in modern society. In conclusion, people live in a society, which has created fear on people of society, that makes people feel and be responsible for their acts. Discourses are really a form in which power is exercised to discipline societies. Foucault’s argument claims discourses are a form of subjection, but this occurs externally not internally.
Flocken endorses that “...hunters are not like natural predators.They target the largest specimens; with the biggest tusks, manes, antlers, or horns.” In Defense of Animals International (IDA) argues that hunters concentrate on“game” populations and ignore “non-game” species that may lead to overpopulation and unequal ecosystems. Therefore, it affects their ecosystem, and the animals’ families. Overall, the evidence proves trophy hunting hurts the environment, specifically conservation. Therefore, the hunters’ idea that trophy hunting actually helps conservation by killing some predators to maintain balance, is merely
For many people, hunting is just a sport, but for some it is a way of life. In Rick Bass’s “Why I Hunt” he explains how he got to where he lives now and what he thinks of the sport of hunting. There are many things in the essay that I could not agree more with, and others that I strongly disagree. Overall this essay provides a clear depiction of what goes through the mind of a hunter in the battle of wits between them and the animal.
Foucault, Michel. “Power and Sex.” Politics. Philosophy. Culture-Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984. Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman. New York, New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc., 1988. 110-124.
It is early in the morning; the majestic Elk bugles in the distance. The sun is kissing the tops of the peaks with the most beautiful gold, and painting the clouds rose red. The men and women who enjoy the outdoors whether it is hunting or just hiking help make these types of moments possible. Hunting and the ecosystem is tied closely to conservation of land and animals. The articles of “Hunting and the ecosystem” written by the South Dakota Game Fish and Parks Department (SDGFP), and “Facts and statistics on wildlife conservation” written by Roger Holmes, director of the Fish and Wildlife, touch on how hunting is important in the environment to keep a good balance in the ecosystem. They also point out how hunters do more than any other organization for wildlife and environment. Our country was created by outdoors men who hunted and they passed their knowledge of the outdoors to their kids. Hunting has worked its way down from the generation and we should learn to “pass it on” Hunting is great for the environment and wildlife and should be preserved for the ages to come.
Hunting has been a necessity for life since the start of time. Hunting was needed to feed family’s day in and day out. But in the twenty first century, Americans have evolved so hunting is not really as big of an obligation as it was in previous generations. Americans have learned to contain specific animals, such as cows, pigs and chickens, farmers then raise them and harvest them for their meat. But in some rural areas of the United States, it is a completely different aspect. Individuals who live in areas such as Alaska, Montana, and The Dakotas don’t have a local grocery store to buy their T-bone steak or ground beef. These individuals have to hunt for their meat in order to survive. Each hunter may have their own individual techniques; they may hunt for specific big or small game animals and use basic or more complex techniques. All of their different techniques come back to the basic techniques used for hunting. But all of the separate hunters have the same common goal, and that is to survive.
As I write this on the first day of gun hunting season it comes into perspective what a huge pastime hunting has become and may I emphasize the word “pastime”. Hunting might have been an important aspect to the lives of prehistoric humans, but today many people hunt for the thrill of it. Did you know hunting kills millions of animals every year, many whom are just wounded and die prolonged, painful deaths? There are slaughter houses and farms that raise animals to kill specifically for these reasons. They are trained in how to properly butcher animals without causing them much pain, something hunters do often. Although hunting may seem like a fun hobby to some, it is a very unnecessary activity that needs to be put to an end.
Hunting can be considered the practice of trapping or killing animals, or pursuing them with the intention of either trapping or killing them. Although this practice was a vital part of the survival of humans 100,000 years ago, it is now considered a violent form of recreation that a majority of hunters do not require for subsistence (National Research Council, 1995). This is because it has contributed heavily to the endangerment, extinction and extirpation of animal species globally. Less than 5% of the population which accounts to 13.7 million people in the United States hunts animals, yet hunting is allowed in numerous national forests, state parks, wildlife refuges and other public lands (U.S. Fish and Wildfire Service, 2012). Nearly 40%
From the perspective of economy, ecology, and environmental conservation, hunting is very important. Hunting is necessary to protect agriculture and the environment from animal pest or overpopulation. For example, wild boars tear up many farmers land causing many problems as well with the deer population growing eating away farmer’s resources. Also with the growth of white tail deer are damaging every landscape east of the Mississippi river. Unfortunately, the harm is very overlooked, and accepted as somehow “natural”. Over the last 30 years higher dear populations have made a more negative impact due to climate change. (“Is Hunting a Good Thing?”) Hunting was legalized in 1993 to help bring overabundant wild animal populations down. The legalization
Foucault used the word docility in order to give an explanation of how control and power was attained through discipline. The body needs attention. People used to be forced to undergo violence and torture. Now times have changed, and people are being subjected to control and discipline. In all institutions of social life; discipline is used. A docile body is one that may be “subjected, used, transformed and improved, and this docile body can only be achieved through strict regimen of disciplinary acts” (Foucault, pg 136). It can be said that docile bodies are submissive. This means most of us are capable of being dominated. This concept made some become aware of the control they could have. They first noticed that it was better to apply force over a single person instead of groups. Then power was used to control by “efficiency of movement, their internal control.” Lastly, control focused on the process instead of the product. Foucault states that this domination is unlike slavery. He says that “discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies; docile bodies” (pg 138). This was not a new discovery; instead it was used as needed. In order to understand the concept of a docile body, you must understand the little things. There are many components that make up the discipline of docile bodies. From the art of distribution, the temporal elaboration of the act, the correlation of the body, and the gesture of the body object articulation, exhaustive use, and lastly the composition of forces. Most of us are docile bodies. This can be said with confidence because we’ve all been through the educational system. The education system is a prime example of disciplining docile bodies. Each disciplinary action required in the making of a docile ...
For centuries, humans have been hunting for food; but in today’s society, hunting is no longer necessary. Advances in the modern world gave people access to Grocery stores and Supermarkets where they can purchase meat instead of going into the woods to shoot down and slaughter an animal in order to feed their families. There is nothing wrong with hunting for food and there may even be times when hunting is necessary for human survival. Unfortunately, because hunting for survival is no longer the norm, much of today 's hunting is done for sport, trophies, or just for the rush of a kill. When, in reality, sport hunting is cruel, unnecessary, and should be banned globally.
There has been a long and on going discourse on the battle of the sexes, and Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex reconfigures the social relation that defines man and women, and how far women has evolved from the second position given to them. In order for us to define what a woman is, we first need to clarify what a man is, for this is said to be the point of derivation (De Beauvoir). And this notion presents to us the concept of duality, which states that women will always be treated as the second sex, the dominated and lacking one. Woman as the sexed being that differs from men, in which they are simply placed in the others category. As men treat their bodies as a concrete connection to the world that they inhabit; women are simply treated as bodies to be objectified and used for pleasure, pleasure that arise from the beauty that the bodies behold. This draws us to form the statement that beauty is a powerful means of objectification that every woman aims to attain in order to consequently attain acceptance and approval from the patriarchal society. The society that set up the vague standard of beauty based on satisfaction of sexual drives. Here, women constantly seek to be the center of attention and inevitably the medium of erection.
Here, the distinction is made between the physiological aspect of sex and the meanings inscribed in it. In this discussion, Merleau-Ponty is referenced in explaining that the body continually realizes a set of possibilities. In framing the body in such a manner, one does not merely have or one is not merely a body – one “does” one’s body. However, there is a constraint to these possibilities made by historical conventions. What this means is that when Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir claim that the body is a historical situation, the body does three things with that historical situation: it does it, dramatizes it, and reproduces it. These can be seen as the elementary structures of embodiment. This embodiment can then be viewed specifically from the perspective of the act of gender. Gender can then be understood differently from the biological sex as gender has a cultural interpretation that is used as a strategy for cultural survival. In its deep entrenchment, gender seems almost natural in the punishments that arise from deviating from acting in a way that creates the very idea of