Seeing Your Sporting Body: Identity, Subjectivity, and Misrecognition

2007 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle T. Helstein
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Female Athlete ◽  
Jacques Lacan ◽  
The Body ◽  
Meaningful Material ◽  
Scientific Laws

This article draws on the work of two poststructural theorists, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan, to illustrate that although it is possible to posit identity from an exclusively discursive account (Foucault) or an exclusively psychoanalytic account (Lacan), it is necessary to put such accounts into conversation to more productively engage in the process of identification. Through use of an advertisement (in which a female athlete sees herself in a mirror) and an analogy to the scientific laws of reflection, this article illustrates that in order to see oneself (identify) one must recognize something in, on, or through their body, and this recognition of the body is always a misrecognition that might more appropriately be called identification. This article is therefore a reading of identification through the productive exploration of the woman on both sides of the mirror, highlighting both discursive and psychoanalytic accounts of her subjectivity. The pervasiveness of the body within these accounts is notable because it highlights the possibilities of the body as a point of articulation between discursive and psychic accounts of identification. The article also illustrates that even when identity is acknowledge as constructed, fragmented, and multiple, it is still meaningful, material, and political.

Discipline

2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 183-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryan S. Turner
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
The Body ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Religious Context ◽  
Medical Regimen ◽  
Body Of Knowledge ◽  
Or Economics ◽  
The Mind

There are broadly five interconnected meanings of the noun ‘discipline’. Disciplinawere instructions to disciples, and hence a branch of instruction or department of knowledge. This religious context provided the modern educational notion of a ‘body of knowledge’, or a discipline such as sociology or economics. We can define discipline as a body of knowledge and knowledge for the body, because the training of the mind has inevitably involved a training of the body. Second, it signified a method of training or instruction in a body of knowledge. Discipline had an important military connection involving drill, practice in the use of weapons. Third, there is an ecclesiastical meaning referring to a system of rules by which order is maintained in a church. It included the use of penal methods to achieve obedience. To discipline is to chastise. Fourth, to discipline is to bring about obedience through various forms of punishment; it is a means of correction. Finally there is a rare use of the term to describe a medical regimen in which ‘doctor's orders’ brings about a discipline of the patient. In contemporary society, there is, following the work of Michel Foucault, the notion of increasing personal regulation resulting in a ‘disciplinary society’ or a society based upon carceral institutions.

scholarly journals Vile Sovereigns in Bioethical Debate

2013 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Melinda Hall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Human Enhancement ◽  
Reproductive Technology ◽  
The Body ◽  
Worth Living ◽  
Lecture Series ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
Bioethical Debate ◽  
Do So

<p>In this paper, I critically assess transhumanist philosophy and its influence in bioethics by turning to resources in the work of Michel Foucault. I begin by outlining transhumanism and drawing out some of the primary goals of transhumanist philosophy. In order to do so, I focus on the work of Nick Bostrom and Julian Savulescu, two prominent contributors to this thinking. I then move to explicate Foucault&rsquo;s work, in the early iterations of the <em>Abnormal</em> lecture series, on the concept of vile sovereignty. Foucault used the concept of vile sovereignty to critique psychiatric witnesses that had been utilized in mid twentieth-century French courts of law. Turning back to transhumanism, I analyze transhumanist discourse on the basis of Foucault&rsquo;s vile sovereignty. Transhumanists promote human enhancement in a way that rejects the body&mdash;especially the disabled body&mdash;and pose the question of what lives are worth living, as well as attempt to answer it. I conclude that because of the undeserved influence and ableism of transhumanism, it is important for feminist philosophers, philosophers of disability, and other disability scholars, who collide at the nexus of bioethical debate (especially with regard to reproductive technology and the body), to work together to intervene upon transhumanist discourse.&nbsp; &nbsp;</p><p>Keywords: bioethics; enhancement; Foucault; transhumanism; ableism</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>

scholarly journals Genealogia da ética: o sujeito em questão

2008 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 204
Author(s):  
Márcio Aparecido Mariguela
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Jacques Lacan

Freud ocupou uma função dobradiça nas pesquisas que Michel Foucault realizou em torno da arqueologia do saber, da genealogia do poder e na genealogia da ética. As diferentes posições do filósofo francês sobre Freud e a psicanálise permitem articular o projeto de escrita de uma genealogia da ética com o movimento de retorno a Freud empreendido pelo psicanalista Jacques Lacan. Pretendo sustentar que a visada de Foucault sobre Freud é recorrente pela função autor que reconheceu atuar na tática genealógica. A obra de Freud, interpretada por Lacan, foi decisiva para Foucault investigar os modos de sujeição e assim estabelecer a distinção entre o que pertence ao campo da moral e aquilo que é próprio ao campo da ética. A problematização do sujeito do desejo permitiu um deslocamento da analítica do poder para a constituição do cuidado de si como um princípio ético para instaurar uma estética de si. 

‘The Party with God’: Michel Foucault, the Gay Left and the Work of Theory

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 122-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Maynard
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Social Constructionism ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Socialist Feminism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sexual Theory ◽  
The City

Revisiting Foucault's month-long stay in Toronto in June 1982, this article explores the reception and appropriation of the first volume of The History of Sexuality by activist-intellectuals associated with the Toronto-based publication, The Body Politic, and some of their fellow travelers. Reading Foucault's introductory volume through the intersecting frameworks of social constructionism, historical materialism, and socialist feminism, gay-left activists forged a distinctive relationship between sexual theory and political practice. If Foucault had a significant impact on activists in the city, Toronto also left its mark on Foucault. Based on the recently rediscovered and unedited transcript of a well-known interview with Foucault in Toronto, along with an interview with one of Foucault's interlocutors, the article concludes with Foucault's forays into Toronto's sexual and political scenes, particularly in relation to ‘bodies and pleasures’ and resistance to the sex police.

Censorship and Its Changing Taboos on the Egyptian Stage—From Politics and Religion to Sexual Frustration

2008 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-184
Author(s):  
Dina Amin
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Control ◽  
The Political ◽  
Dramatic Literature ◽  
Politics And Religion ◽  
Point Of Intersection ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Gain Access

When asked about “political control of a population,” Michel Foucault responded, “[P]ower had to gain access to the bodies of individual, to their acts, attitudes, and modes of everyday behavior . . .I believe that the political significance of the problem of sex is due to the fact that sex is located at the point of intersection of the discipline of the body and the control of the population.” This insight is often reflected in the relationship between literature that deals with the body and the discipline imposed on it by various institutions (whether religious or social) in the form of censorship. One good example of that “ethical” exercise of power versus dramatic literature emerged when Sameh Mahran, a professor at the Cairo Academy of Arts, wrote Al-Marakbi (The Boatman), a play in two acts with an epilogue.

Expertise and Non-binary Bodies: Sex, Gender and the Case of Dutee Chand

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madeleine Pape
Keyword(s):  
Women Athletes ◽  
Athletic Performance ◽  
Female Athlete ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Biological Difference ◽  
And Gender

How do institutions respond to expert contests over epistemologies of sex and gender? In this article, I consider how epistemological ascendancy in debates over the regulation of women athletes with high testosterone is established within a legal setting. Approaching regulation as an institutional act that defines forms of embodied difference, the legitimacy of which may be called into question, I show how sexed bodies are enacted through and as part of determinations of expertise. I focus on proceedings from 2015 when the Court of Arbitration for Sport was asked to decide whether an Indian sprinter, Dutee Chand, could compete as a female athlete. Despite acknowledging that sexed bodies are unruly, the court ultimately endorsed the use of testosterone as seemingly essential to women’s athletic performance, thereby reasserting a two-category model of biological difference. The legitimacy of these regulatory efforts was established through the concurrent narrowing of expertise and the body, a process that is also revealed to be gendered.

Power, Space, and the Body: A Critical Assessment of Foucault's Discipline and Punish

1985 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 425-446 ◽  
Author(s):  
F Driver
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body

The work of Michel Foucault has recently been subjected to considerable scrutiny. This paper is an examination of his book, Discipline and Punish, which describes an historical transformation in the exercise of power. The themes (section 2) and the significance (section 3) of the book are discussed in terms of Foucault's conception of history and power. In the rest of the paper, its implications are examined more closely, through four categories: ‘institutions’, ‘the economy’, ‘law and the state’, and ‘struggle and strategy’. Under these headings are discussed the connections and contradictions between Foucault's analysis and more conventional Marxist or Weberian approaches. Although Foucault's perspectives cannot be ‘incorporated’ within such theories of power, they are far from being completely incompatible with them.

scholarly journals New Poetics of the Film Body: Docility, Molecular Fundamentalism and Twenty First Century Destiny

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Flynn
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Fundamental Level ◽  
Twenty First Century

Abstract Twenty first century film evokes a new topology of the body. Science and technology are the new century’s ‘sovereign power’ which enforces biopolitics through bodies which, by virtue of being seen at their most fundamental level, have become docile surfaces. The film body is at once manipulated and coerced into an ethos of optimization; a thoroughly scientific and ‘molecular’ optimization which proffers ‘normalization’ and intimately regulated bodies. In the film bodies of this millennium, bodily intervention results in surveillance becoming internalized. Now the body is both a means and an end of social control. This essay applies the philosophies Michel Foucault and Nikolas Rose to twenty first century Hollywood film, elucidating a new tropos, a new film body/body of film.

Somatechnologies

2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 110-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Lettow ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Philosophy Of Technology ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Politics ◽  
Minor Role ◽  
Technological Means ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Body Technologies

Until now, the body has played only a minor role in the philosophy of technology. However, more elaborate reflections on the relation between technology and the body are needed because of the advent of somatechnologies – technologies intentionally geared toward modifying bodies and that use bodily substances as technological means. The article discusses some approaches within the philosophy of technology that prove to be fruitful in this context. The article argues thatsomatechnical modifications of bodies should be understood as elements of ‘body technologies’ and body politics in a broader sense. In such a perspective, concepts of the body developed by Judith Butler and Michel Foucault should be adopted by a praxeological philosophy of technology.

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