Mid-Term Assignment

ANT342: Body and Culture

3) What is disciplined body? How Foucault's works help to formulate this idea?
Answer: Discipline and Punish is described by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. It is an
analysis of the social and theoretical mechanisms behind the changes that occurred in Western
social control systems during the modern age based on historical documents from France. Foucault
argues that prison did not become the principal form of punishment just because of the
humanitarian concerns of reformists. He traces the cultural shifts that led to the predominance of
prison via the body and power. Prison used by the "disciplines" - new technological powers that can
also be found, according to Foucault, in places such as schools, hospitals and military barracks.
Foucault constructs his ideas around the methods and strategies employed in the seventeenth
century for creating docile bodies. He begins with a description of the soldier. A soldier then and
now is recognizable through certain body postures, clothing, accessories such as- guns, medals,
swords, hats and movements. Even in a busy airport or an urban mall, the soldier is recognizable
from a distance through these signs. Foucault explained that movements like marching and attitudes
like the bearing of the head belonged for the most part to a bodily rhetoric of honor which allowed
one to recognize the soldier from afar.
Foucault describes that the classical age discovered the body as object and target of power.
According to Foucault, the methods of power consists regulations, methods and operations utilized
within the military, the school, and the hospital. A body is docile that may be subjected, used,
transformed and improved. These methods resulted not only in bodies which automatically moved
or thought in lockstep with its creators, but functioned as political puppets, what Foucault describes
as small-scale models of power.
Foucault describes what was new in the eighteenth century that contributed to the construction of
docile bodies within the military, the school and the hospital. These techniques differed in the scale
of control, the object of the control, and the modality of the methods. The scale of control was
individualized; that is, control was at the level of the individual himself. The mechanism of control
operated upon the movements, gestures, and attitudes of the individuals body. The object of the
control was to become efficient in movement, in exercising the movements, gestures and attitudes.
There was constant coercion; Foucault calls them disciplines. But in the course of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries the disciplines became general formulas of domination. Foucault points
out that these disciplines were different from previous ones, such as slavery, service or asceticism.

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Foucault believes that the question of the nature of changes is best asked by assuming that they
weren't used to create a more human-centered social control system, nor to more exactly punish or
rehabilitate, but as part of a continuing trajectory of subjection. He explains that power and
knowledge imply one another, as opposed to the common belief that knowledge exists
independently of power relations. Knowledge is always contextualized in a framework which
makes it intelligible, so the humanizing discourse of psychiatry is an expression of the tactics of
oppression. That is, the ground of the game of power isn't won by liberation, because liberation
already exists as a facet of subjection. The problem for Foucault is in some sense a theoretical
modeling which situates a soul, an identity which allows a whole materiality of prison to develop.
Foucault also deals with notion of identity, and its use as a method of control, regulation, and
tracking.
The emergence of prison as the form of punishment for every crime grew out of the development of
discipline in the 18th and 19th centuries, according to Foucault. He looks at the development of
highly refined forms of discipline, of discipline concerned with the smallest and most precise
aspects of a person's body. Discipline, he suggests, developed a new economy and politics for
bodies. Modern institutions required that bodies must be individuated according to their tasks, as
well as for training, observation, and control. Therefore, he argues, discipline created a whole new
form of individuality for bodies, which enabled them to perform their duty within the new forms of
economic, political, and military organizations emerging in the modern age and continuing to today.
Foucault's argument is that discipline creates "docile bodies", ideal for the new economics, politics
and warfare of the modern industrial age. Bodies that function in factories, ordered military
regiments, and school classrooms. But, to construct docile bodies the disciplinary institutions must
be able to constantly observe and record the bodies they control and ensure the internalization of the
disciplinary individuality within the bodies being controlled. That is, discipline must come about
without excessive force through careful observation, and molding of the bodies into the correct
form through this observation. This requires a particular form of institution, exemplified.
Foucault also mentioned that the human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it,
breaks it down and rearranges it. The political anatomy was also a mechanics of power. Therefore,
discipline produces, increases, diminishes, dissociates and reverses the forces of the body such that
as the body was increasingly disciplined, it was also increasingly dominated.

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4) What is bio-politics? (Foucault). Discuss the connection between bio-politics that the state (both
advanced capitalist and post-colonial) adopts?
Answer: Michel Foucault's theory of bio-politics was developed to examine the mechanisms and
strategies through which human life processes are managed under regimes of authority over
knowledge, power and the processes of the construction of an individual. Foucault's concept of bio-
politics is largely derived from his own notion of biopower, and the extension of state power over
both the physical and political bodies of a population. His concept of bio-politics has become
prominent in social and humanistic sciences. Foucault described bio-politics as "a new technology
of power that exists at a different level, on a different scale, and has a different bearing area, and
makes use of very different instruments. More than a disciplinary mechanism, Foucault's bio-
politics acts as a control equipment used over a population as a whole.
According to Foucault, political order is maintained through the 'docile bodies' which are passive,
subjugated and productive individuals. The state brings all aspects of life under its controlling gaze
through its many institutions such as schools, hospitals, prisons, family etc. Government created
discipline, surveillance and punishment of the body, creates bodies that are habituated to external
regulation, working to discipline the body. Foucault deploys the concept of government or
governmentality as a guideline for the analysis by way of historical reconstructions embracing a
period starting from Ancient Greek through to modern neo-liberalism . These concepts arre
emphasized on two points here, as they seem important for an adequate assessment of the
innovative potential of the notion of governmentality.
First of all,the concept of governmentality demonstrates Foucaults working hypothesis on the
reciprocal constitution of power techniques and forms of knowledge. The semantic linking of
governing and modes of thought indicates that it is not possible to study the technologies of power
without an analysis of the political rationality underpinning them. In other words, there are two
sides to governmentality. On the one hand, the term pin-points a specific form of representation,
government defines a discursive field in which exercising power is rationalized. This occurs, among
other things, by the delineation of concepts, the specification of objects and borders, the provision
of arguments and justifications etc. In this manner, government enables a problem to be addressed
and offers certain strategies for solving or handling the problem. On the other hand, it also
structures specific forms of intervention. For a political rationality is not pure, neutral knowledge
which simply represents the governing reality, instead, itself constitutes the intellectual processing
of the reality which political technologies can then tackle. This is understood to include agencies,
procedures, institutions, legal forms, etc, that are intended to enable us to govern the objects and

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subjects of a political rationality.
Second, Foucault uses the concept of government in a comprehensive sense regarded strongly to the
older meaning of the term and adumbrating the close link between power relations and processes of
subjectification. While the word government today possesses solely a political meaning, Foucault is
able to show that up until well into the eighteenth century the problem of government was placed in
a more general context. Government was a term discussed not only in political tracts, but also in
philosophical, religious, medical and pedagogic texts. In addition to control/ management by the
state or the administration, government also signified problems of self-control, guidance for the
family and for children, management of the household, directing the soul, etc. For this reason,
Foucault defines government as conduct, or, more precisely, as 'the conduct of conduct' and thus as
a term which ranges from governing the self to governing others. All in all, in his history of
governmentality Foucault endeavors to show how the modern sovereign state and the modern
autonomous individual codetermine each others emergence .

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5) What is hegemonic masculinity? Referring Connel, Howson, described three main characteristics
of hegemonic masculinity in western culture. Briefly describe these characteristics.
Answer: Hegemonic masculinity is defined as a practice that legitimizes men's dominant position in
society and justifies the subordination of women, and other marginalized ways of being a man.
Conceptually, hegemonic masculinity proposes to explain how and why men maintain dominant
social roles over women, and other gender identities, which are perceived as 'feminine' in a given
society. The conceptual beginnings of hegemonic masculinity represented the culturally idealized
form of manhood that was socially and hierarchically exclusive and concerned with bread-winning.
This concept was anxiety-provoking and at the same time was brutal and violent. The concept of
hegemonic masculinity has been used in gender studies for decades to explain mens power over
women. Stressing the legitimating power of consent, rather than rough physical or political power to
ensure submission, it has been used to explain mens health behaviors and the use of violence.
Feminist scholars have made significant contributions to conceptualizing gender relations as a set of
relationships to address critiques of static and binary constructions of gender and to re-establish
gender as socially constructed and relational. They have also advanced understandings of the
complex diversity within and across genders by incorporating analysis of other social relationships
including class, ethnicity and race, and their impact at various ages to acknowledge and anchor the
context-specific influences that underlie gender dynamics. One of the most influential voices in
theorizing gender relations has been that of the sociologist Raewyn Connell. Connell's concept was
particularly in men's health research. Connell advanced the theory that masculinities and
femininities play out at a societal level, and while there are diverse and multiple forms, all are
shaped by the structural influences wherein men dominate women. In recognizing the gender
hierarchy, hegemonic masculinity was conceptualized as an idealized masculinity that subordinates
other masculinities and femininities. On the other hand, Howson's work is an important contribution
to gender relations, extending Connell's framework by describing categories of masculinities and
femininities as emerging in response to hegemonic masculinity. A plurality of masculinities -
complicit, marginalized, sub-ordinate and protest are proposed to operate in relation to hegemonic
masculinity. In addition, Howson proposes three femininities that function in relation to hegemonic
masculinity, which are: emphasized, ambivalent and protest. This conceptualization of gender
relations challenges constructs of masculinity and femininity as binary opposites amid highlighting
the diversity within the gender categories, and the relational gender dynamics in society.
Connell and Howson makes the point that the particular ways in which any one individual displays
masculinity and femininity will vary and points to the considerable range of gender displays

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discernible in western culture. Conell suggessts that the term gender is not a description of attributes
or traits possessed by individuals but is indicative of social relations and cultural norms that shape
processes of interaction and bodily conduct. As we know that the body is a cultural artifact shaped
by ideas. Hence, it is perhaps more helpful to think of masculinities in the plural, rather than the
singular masculinity. Nonetheless, both he sociologists identifies dominant versions of masculinity
and femininity that inform how people do gender.
Hegemonic masculinity is the dominant version of masculinity in western culture and is associated
with three main characteristics. First, hegemonic masculinity emphasizes heterosexuality and
subordinates homosexuality. As observed, though homosexuality has existed across historical time,
those who identify themselves as homosexuals may experience discrimination. Second, hegemonic
masculinity is constructed and exists in relation to emphasized femininity, such that femininity can
be defined only in relation to hegemonic masculinity. Third, hegemonic masculinity privileges a
particular kind of male body, a masculine body. Analysis of visual culture demonstrates the
prevalence of hegemonic masculinity as a cultural norm, but the point made by Connell is that such
images influence self-identity and shape bodily conduct.
This pool of available characteristics results from the fact that hegemonic masculinity is always
situated within dynamic relations with other masculinities. Subordinate masculinities can also
provide a pool of characteristics for a new types of hegemonic masculinities. However, hegemonic
masculinity will always integrate exclusively characteristics, which are defined as desirable at a
given historical moment, whereas undesirable traits are displaced onto marginalized or subordinate
masculinities. Connell and Howson describes how the process of secularization and
industrialization as well as imperialism have led to a reshaping of masculinities and have produced
new types of masculinities. Not only that, the increasing of glottalization and westernization has
affected the gender order of societies.

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References:

Howson, A. Regulaing the Bodysty

Hewitt, M. Bio-politics and social polity: Foucault's account of Welfare

Shilling, C. The Socially constructed Body