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.
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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...
According to Foucault, the individual is created and removed from the society by subjecting him to certain norms. This ensures that the individual is created to fit into an already constructed power hierarchy as opposed to creating a society in which individuals a...
Perhaps no other event in modern history has left us so perplexed and dumbfounded than the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany, an entire population was simply robbed of their existence. In “Our Secret,” Susan Griffin tries to explain what could possibly lead an individual to execute such inhumane acts to a large group of people. She delves into Heinrich Himmler’s life and investigates all the events leading up to him joining the Nazi party. In“Panopticism,” Michel Foucault argues that modern society has been shaped by disciplinary mechanisms deriving from the plague as well as Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a structure with a tower in the middle meant for surveillance. Susan Griffin tries to explain what happened in Germany through Himmler’s childhood while Foucault better explains these events by describing how society as a whole operates.
Despite there being numerous argumentative points for both the hunter and the environmentalist there is no definite answer as to whether hunting should be permitted or not. Each individual has their own perspective on hunting and what is acceptable and what is intolerable. Hunting may be viewed as acceptable for survival purposes only by some and others may approve sport hunting as well. Some environmentalist would like to see all forms of hunting and trapping completely banned including pig and dairy farms. Hunting can be seen as a way to entertain and relax in one’s eyes while it can also be seen as the cruelest form of animal cruelty and murder from another individual’s perspective. Hunting is completely subjective to the views and morals of the person trying to decide what is right and what is wrong.
... E Glenn, and Nancy B Sherrod. The psychology of men and masculinity:Research status and future directions. New York: John Wiley and sons, 2001.
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
Years ago, killing animals for food was part of the average man’s everyday life. While, now a days, hunting is questioned by many across the world because it is commonly viewed as a recreational activity. Many residents have a problem with the dangers that come with hunting. Not to mention, as time goes on, society seems to feel differently about animals and how they should be treated. One of the biggest debates is the harvest of white tailed deer. All over the United States, white tailed deer thrive because of the few predators that feast upon them and the large forests and habitats that these deer can flourish in. However, as buildings and subdivisions pop up left and right decreasing the white tailed deer natural habitat, the debate grows stronger. The heart of the debate is centered around ethical issues, human and deer conflicts, safety, and the benefits hunting has on the economy.
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.
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%
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.
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.
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.
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