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I.
Michel Foucault¡¦s critique against the newly-formed ¡§darker countermovement¡¨
A.
A discipline
1. invading the body
2. seeking to regulate its
a. forces and operations
b. the economy and efficiency of the movement
B.
A disciplinary practices (such as the army, they school, the hospital,
the prison, and the manufactory
1. purpose of discipline:
a. to increase the utility of the body
b. to augment its forces
2. the production of ¡§docile bodies¡¨
a. requiring ¡§an uninterrupted coercion be directed to the very processes of bodily activity, not just their result¡¨;
b. the ¡§microphysics of power¡¨ actually turns to ¡§fragments and partitions the body¡¦s time, its space, and its movements¡¨;
c. examples of docile body ¡V the body-object articulations of the soldiers and the students ¡§effect a ¡¥coercive link with the apparatus of production.¡¦¡¨
3. Practice of discipline
a. Jeremy Benthan¡¦s design: Panopticon
i ¡§the effect of this is ¡¥to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility¡¦¡¨ (which assures the automatic functioning of power).
ii ¡§this ¡¥state of conscious and permanent visibility¡¦ is a sign that ihe tight, disciplinary control of the body has gotten a hold on the mind as well.¡¨
iii The perpetual self-surveillance of the inmate generate and consolidate the concept of individualism and self-consciousness
b. Flaw of Foucault¡¦s account
i Foucault treats the body as if it were one
ii Bartky¡¦s view: ¡§[H]e is blind to those disciplines that produce a modality of embodiment that is peculiarly feminine¡¨ (132).
4. Bartky¡¦s examination of the disciplinary practices which produces a body that ¡§in gesture and appearance¡¨ is feminine ¡V 3 categories of practices:
a. Category 1: ¡§aims to produce a body of a certain size and general configuration¡¨
b. Category 2: brings forth ¡§a specific repertoire of gestures, postures, and movements
c. Category 3: ¡§directed toward the display of this body as an ornamented surface¡¨
II.
Female Figure that matters ¡V female body as way to execute
discipline
l Styles of the female figure reflect cultural obsessions and preoccupations in ways that are still poor understood
1. popular culture reveals women¡¦s ideal image
2. dieting disciplines the body¡¦s hunger
3. physical fitness and exercise
4. resculpture of ones¡¦ body
5. not only woman¡¦s natural appetite but her facial expressions can change ¡§the disciplinary project of ¡¥bodily perfection.¡¦¡¨
III.
Unequal Gender Difference
A.
An imaginative space surrounding woman
B.
An even finer disciplined woman ¡V interaction with people
1. ¡§Feminine faces, as well as bodies, are trained to the expression of deference.¡¨
2. ¡§Female gaze is trained to abandon the claim¡¨ (to the sovereign status of the watcher).
3. ¡§under male scrutiny, women will avert their eyes or cast them downward.¡¨
C.
The bodily-disciplined feminine movement
1. constricted gesture and posture
2. the concept of ¡§grace¡¨ ¡V women¡¦s posture
3. eroticism restrained by modesty
IV.
Woman¡¦s Body and Femininity ¡V woman¡¦s body as an ornamented
surface
A.
The production of ¡§the proper styles of feminine motility
1. disciplines on women¡¦s body
2. the application of make-up and the selection of clothes
3. the avoidance of strong facial expressions and the performance of facial exercises
4. the assistance of the normalizing discourse of modern medicine
B.
Woman¡¦s obligation
1. ¡§like the schoolchild or prisoner, the woman mastering good skin-care habits is put on a timetable.¡¨¡@ Every procedure of hair-care or skin-care arrangement requires an investment of time, various preparation, mastery of technique and acquisition of specialized knowledgement.
2. fashion industry teaches women that making up is an ¡§esthetic activity¡¨ that enables women to express their individuality.
V.
Femininity and Discipline ¡V the disciplinary practices that
construct the ideal body of femininity
A.
Fashion industry that suggests the unpainted woman¡¦s face is defective,
woman¡¦s natural body is deficient.
1. bombardment of the media images of perfect female beauty
2. the sense that women¡¦s bodies are deficient makes them practice the discipline on their bodies compulsively and ritualistically
B.
¡§the disciplinary project of femininity is a ¡¥set-up.¡¦¡¨
1. ¡§It requires such radical and extensive measures of bodily transformation that [ÿ] every woman who gives herself to it is destined in some degree to fail.
2. Feeling ashamed of not taking good care of her body, woman is more aware of the deficient body
3. Poor women bear more pressure because of the limit of time and money for them to mind the regimen.¡@ Their pressure is not mere psychological one due to the fact that ¡§conformity to the prevailing standards of bodily acceptability is a known factor in economic mobility¡¨ (139).
4. Women disregard of race and class pursue the same general result of the way they look, the ideal image of femininity.
C.
Institutionalized heterosexual woman must make herself ¡§object and prey¡¨
for the man.
1. ¡§Woman lives her body as seen by another, by an anonymous patriarchal Other¡¨ (140).
2. Performance for another does not indicate the inferior one or the superior one
3. femininity is something enacted
a. ¡§femininity as spectacle is something in which virtually every woman is required to participate.¡¨
b. ¡§the precise nature of the criteria [ÿ] reflects gross imbalances in the social power of the sexes.
4. Rules for ¡§tyranny of slenderness¡¨
a. Women are not allowed to be massive or large, and they are supposed to take as little space as possible
b. Woman¡¦s body is taken as immature, is infantiled with the theme of inexperience
c. ¡§the face of the ideally feminine woman must never display the marks of character, wisdom, and experience that we so admire in men.¡¨
d. Women¡¦s successful provision of a beautiful or sexy body indeed may gain them attention or admiration, but not respect or social power.
e. Woman¡¦s body is inferior:
i ¡§women¡¦s typical body language, a language of relative tension and constriction, is understood to be a language of subordination when it is enacted by men in male status hierarchies.¡¨
ii E.g. women tens to sit or stand with legs/knees closed may be ¡§a coded declaration of sexual circumspection.¡¨
VI.
Apparatus of Discipline ¡V the disciplinarians that discipline:
¡§a system of micropower that is essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical¡¨
A.
¡§The disciplinary power that inscribes femininity in the female body is
everywhere and it is nowhere; the disciplinarian is everyone and yet no one
in particular¡¨ (142).
B.
Foucault regards certain operation of specific institutions as the locus
that inscribe the imposition of discipline
1. Problem:¡@ this view overlooks ¡§the extent to which discipline can be institutionally unbound as well as institutionally bound.¡¨
2. Since there is no specific institutional structure or authorities that invest power to ¡§carry out institutional directives,¡¨ it is possible that the production of femininity is voluntarily or naturally.
a. Discipline is something imposed on subjects of an ¡§essentially inegalitarian and asymmetrical¡¨ system of authority.
b. Discipline can be sought voluntarily as well
C.
Feminine bodily disciple ¡V dual characters: femininity is both imposed
on subjects and sought voluntarily
1. ¡§the disciplinary practices of femininity produce a ¡¥subjected and practiced,¡¦ an inferiorized body¡¨
a. the system aims to turn women into ¡§the docile and compliant companious of men¡¨ (143).
D.
¡§The social construction of the feminine body is all these things, but
it is at base discipline, too, and discipline of the inegalitarian sort.¡@
The absence of formally identifiable disciplinarians and of a public
schedule of sanctions serves only to disguise the extent to which the imperative
to be ¡¥feminine¡¦ serves the interest of domination¡¨ (143).
à Due to this view, Bartky suggests that we need an appreciation of the extent of how women¡¦s lives and their subjectivities are constructed, through a detailed understanding of women¡¦s oppression.
VII.
Internalized Discipline ¡V a severe sanction that women face
A.
Internalized conception
1. various modes of perception and self-perception (that enables one to distinguish herself from other selves) construct Bartky¡¦s idea of ¡§structure of the self¡¨ (145).
2. internalization ¡V
a. ¡§a generalized male witness comes to structure woman¡¦s consciousness of herself as a bodily being;¡¨
b. ¡§the sense of oneself as a distinct and valuable individual is tied not only to the sense of how one is perceived, but also what one knows, esp. to what one know show to do.¡¨
3. Discipline provide and impose one a sense of mastery and a secure sense of identity
B.
Resistance
1. the imposition of discipline promote certain disempowerment, but it may also develop a person¡¦s power
2. ¡§feminism [ÿ] threatens women with a certain deskilling, something people normally resist.¡¨
3. Resistance hence is joined by ¡§a reluctance to part with the rewards of compliance.¡¨
a. Many women tend to resist ¡§the abandonment of an aesthetic that defines what they take to be beautiful.¡¨
b. Questions of identity and internalization
n ¡§to have a body felt to be feminine is in most cases crucial to a woman¡¦s sense of herself as female.¡¨
n ¡§to possess such a body may also be essential to her sense of herself as a sexually desiring and desirable subject.
4. ¡§The categories of masculinity and femininity do more than assist in the construction of personal identities; they are critical elements in our informal social ontology.¡¨
a. Many women favors a program of political and economic reform in the struggle to gain equality with men.
b. Orthodox Marxists regards ¡§the preservation of a woman¡¦s femininity is quite compatible with her struggle for liberation¡¨ (146).
c. Foucault argued that ¡§modern bourgeois democracy is deeply flawed in that it seeks political rights for individuals constituted as unfree by a variety of disciplinary micropowers that lie beyond the realm of what is ordinarily defined as the ¡¥political.¡¦¡¨
VIII.
Invasive Apparatuses of Power
A.
The transition
1. From traditional society to modern one, a profound transformation in the exercise of power, for Foucault, is ¡§a reversal of the political axis of individualization.¡¨
2. On the contrary, increasing invasive apparatuses of power appear in modern society.
a. ¡§In modern societies, effects of power ¡¥cirulate through progressively finer channels, gaining access to individuals themselves, to their bodies, their gestures and all their daily actions.¡¦¡¨
b. ¡§Power now seeks to transform the minds of those individuals who might be tempted to resist it, not merely to punish or imprison their bodies.¡¨ ¡V A finer control of the body¡¦s time and its movement is required.
c. ¡§The power these new apparatuses seek to exercise requires a new knowledge to of the individual: Modern psychology and sociology are born.
d. Power is exercised in a ¡§bureaucratic mode¡¨ which is faceless, centralized, and pervasive. à this enhances a reversal occurred: ¡§power has now become anonymous, while the project of control has brought into being a new individuality.
e. Foucault believes that the very subjectivity of the subject is, in fact, constituted by the operation of power.
f. The gaze, originated from the surveillance of the institution, is internalized by the inmate (or the controlled) ¡V ¡§modern technologies of behavior are thus oriented toward the production of isolated and self-policing subjects.¡¨
B.
Woman¡¦s own experience of the modernization of power
1. Though woman¡¦s behavior is less regulated, power in institutions, such as working places or family, was managed by the individuals that she knows.¡@
E.g. Husbands and fathers enforced patriarchal authority in the family.¡@
2. ¡§In the days when civil and ecclesiastical authority were still conjoined, individuals formally invested with power were charged with the correction of recalcitrant women whom the family had somehow failed to constrain¡¨ (148).
C.
The disciplinary power is dispersed and anonymous
1. femininity is further properly embodied
2. no individuals is empowered to manipulate the disciplinary power
3. this disciplinary power is modern
4. the power invading the body is almost completely: ¡§the female body enters ¡¥a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it.¡¦¡@ The disciplinary techniques through which the ¡¥docile bodies¡¦ of women are constructed aim at a regulation which is perpetual and exhaustive ¡V a regulation of the body¡¦s size and contours, its appetite, posture, gesture, and general comportment in space and the appearance of each of its visible parts¡¨ (148).
D.
Normative femininity that comes more and more centered on woman¡¦s body
1. Despite the fact the modern society allows women to have more and more rooms in their resistance to patriarchy, woman¡¦s sexuality, its presumed heterosexuality and appearance become the major focus.
2. ¡§to subject oneself to the new disciplinary power is to be up-to date, to be ¡§with-it¡¨
3. The woman that is more aware of her look becomes ¡§a self-policing subject, a self committed to a relentless self-surveillance.¡¨
4. ¡§This self-surveillance is a form of obedience to patriarchy.¡@ It is also the reflection in woman¡¦s consciousness of the fact that she is under surveillance in ways that he is not, that whatever else she may become, she is importantly a body designed to please or to excite.¡¨
E.
Bartky¡¦s question and Peter Dews¡¦ doubt
1. Bartky: ¡§if individuals were wholly constituted by the power/knowledge regime Foucault describes, it would make no sense to speak of resistance to discipline at all¡¨ (150).
2. Peter Dews: Foucault¡¦s theory is in lack of the concept of the ¡§libidinal body¡¨ à for example: ¡§the body upon which discipline is imposed and whose bedrock impulse toward spontaneity and pleasure might perhaps become the locus of resistance.¡¨
3. women¡¦s ¡§libidinal¡¨ bodies rebel against the pain and constriciction, semistarvation and constant self-surveillance, but the rebellions is conquered every time a woman recollects her consciousness of her look and the sense of control her appetite.
F.
A ¡¥libidinal¡¦ body as a natural body that is not the origin of a revolt
against ¡¥culture¡¦
1. ¡§domination and the discipline [this body] requires are never imposed without some cost¡¨ (150).
2. women cannot revision their own bodies unless
a. they ¡§learn to read the cultural messages¡¨ they impose upon them daily;
b. they ¡§come to see that even when the mastery of the disciplines of femininity produce a triumphant result,¡¨ they cannot the change the fact that they are women.
Bartky, Sandra Lee.¡@ ¡§Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.¡¨¡@ Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory.¡@ Eds. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury.¡@ New York: Columbia UP, 1997.¡@ 122-81.