Docile Bodies:
Your Topics:
1. Modification through Cosmetic Surgery
2. Commercialized versions of the body
3. Technologies of Modification of Body Parts
Consumers, consumerism & commodification:
Your Topics:
1. Students as Consumers of Knowledge
2. Commodification of education
3. Women students disciplined
Why study Media and Movies (popular culture)?
• Cinema is a symbolic system:“mediating the
spectator and the world in countless
exchangeable ways” (Morrison ,1990: 150).
• A mediation between the real world and the
spectator who watch and gaze. Watching films of
Hollywood - an effective tool in conditioning the
characters.
• Cinema conditions visual life – it empowers
perception - language conspires with perception
of images
Hollywood as a cinematic apparatus:
Disseminate the “Normal”
e.g.: Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye - cinema
is a machine that targets the minds and the psyches of
her female characters – a society that daily practices
the modelling of individuals through the institutions
of :
Family
Educational institutions
Mass media
Individuals desire :
• to represent images of the flawless body
• to climb the ladder of beauty
"Each night Pecola prayed for
blue eyes.
In her eleven years, no one had
ever noticed Pecola. But with blue
eyes, she thought, everything
would be different. She would be
so pretty that her parents would
stop fighting. Her father
would stop drinking. Her brother
would stop running away. If
only she could be beautiful.
If only people would look at her."
(Back Cover)
Consumers, consumerism & commodification:
1. Students as Consumers of Knowledge
2. Commodification of education
3. Women students disciplined
How do Consumers become captured body as they are lured into
surveillance machines?
1. Participants in their own capture - participate in bodies being
watched - exchange databody for product
2. Click-and-buy has an intermediary step - it is indicated that a
certain information is to be collected about you.
3. In-between step: the participant may say, “whatever” and may feel
a sense of docility or futility
4. To participate in consumer society, one has to be watched – Is
resistance futile? It’s more that you wouldn’t if you could:
“Whatever.”
5. Surveillance has allowed the docile to consume not product but
space, e.g.: in airports, on the way to your remote comfort lounge
6. Password society has overtaken the Panoptic
7. Surveillance captures bodies
8. Grants physical access to the body as Databodies
• Databodies wait at customs at Airports
• Bodies arch their necks for the eye-scanner (Deleuze)
• Consumer is Aware and Profiled
• If the body wishes to becoming a unique individual and
behave less like a shopper/consumer - “I want to be me,
not them,” looking at the profiling machine showing his
transparent image for the profiler at the back of the
machine
• “ I want to escape from this rendering of myself? How can
I recompile my dataself?”
1. the self is taken over by data capture, storage,
algorithm, and recommendation
2. If the consumer tries to reassert himself through
interactions with his TV and digital video recorder TiVo.
Confessions and Control
Content and Influences of Reality TV
Representations of Youth/Women/Men
Reality TV
Judge Joe Brown, and Divorce Court
The People’s Court, Judge Mathis, and Judge Hatchett.
Disciplinary Measures: Reinscribing Morality
1.
2.
3.
4.
Power
Surveillance
Spectacle
Docile Bodies
Mediating Morality: Discursive Implications
Documentary & News: Youth, Mom, Parenting, Child models
1.What are the productive effects of the power invested in the
cinematic investigation of sex?
2.What techniques of power and the will to truth are implicated in
the cinematic form of the interview?
3.The body is specific – that of the filmed and of the filmmaker
4.Where do film-makers stand and how do they represent their
views and positioning?
5.To what extent should they question their right to represent the
perceptions and concerns of others?
6.Do they represent their own knowledge as situated or
omniscient?
7.What are the consequences of these choices?
8.How does profit intersect with pleasure in such an investigation?
9.What instruments are used to make a body docile - a sexual
subject, body in confessional, into an electronic body?
Obese Body, Cosmetic body, Modified body and
Ambiguous Body
1. Symbolic role and rhetorical function of mediated
representations of food or cosmetics.
2. How films use food or cosmetics to engage bodies
3. How do films comfort bodies while individuals
consciously become imprisoned bodies?
4. How do films mediate anxieties that arise from
ambiguous identities in contemporary culture,
especially around beauty. gender, sexuality,
race/ethnicity.
Plagiarism and student as docile consumer body :
1.What is the process of Self-surveillance by the student ?
•
•
•
Education as governmentality as well as misguided efforts
in education are regimes of self-examination and selfsurveillance linked to a notion of power that operates from
within the student, rather than from above or from outside.
In the process of becoming a ‘student subject’ the student
becomes a self-monitoring agent and peer-controlled
through use of social media .
The imperative of confession is used to situate the student
within a particular nexus of power – confessions to peer, to
others, and to the public.
Docile Bodies:
Electronic databodies
Consuming databodies
Cosmetic databodies
Techniques of discipline :
Disciplining is the technology of power over the body:
•
•
•
•
•
•
Movie and Image representations: surveillance, normalization,
objectification, control, disciplining
Narratives in print media: same as above
Facebook: Stealing or using personal profiles
Spyware , a panoptic tool intrusively extract user
information for corporate and state authorities
Pop-ups as adware breaches privacy and invisibly intrudes
to control totally
Carnivore, a sophisticated wiretapping/ eavesdropping
program developed by the U.S. Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) to allow FBI to spy on online/e-mail
activities of suspected criminals which chews all the data on
the network, although it eats only the information
authorized by a court order
"The intelligible body includes…our cultural conceptions of
the body, norms of beauty, models of health, and so forth. But
the same representations may also be seen as forming a set of
practical rules and regulations through which the living body
is "trained, shaped, obeys, responds," becoming, in short, a
socially adapted and "useful body."" (Bordo, 181)
Body is raw material to be molded and
reshaped into something better and
different.
http://www.sacredgroundstattoo.com/image/2217652.jpeg
"…cosmetic surgery, piercing, aerobics,
and nautilus all point to a conception of
the body as raw material to be
fragmented into parts, molded, and
reshaped into a more perfect form….The
body has become, like Barbie, all
surface, a ground for staging cultural
identities." (Urla & Swedlund, 305)
Exercise is now commodified and broken down into repeatable
steps and specific procedures. The fit body functions like a
machine, hardened, strong, aligned and perfectly capable of
completing difficult repetitious tasks, such as repeated weight
lifting.
"Those are NOT Real": Plastic Surgery and Authenticity
http://students.washington.edu/gaspee/ accessed Feb 2010
Normal and Productive Bodies
Liz Gasperini
"Happiness in this instance exists in crossing the boundary separating one category from
another. It is rooted in the necessary creation of arbitrary demarcations between the
perceived reality of the self and the ideal category into which one desires to move."
(Gilman, 22)
Is the body a machine?
Is it becoming docile or does it release the inner self to be free?
http://www.impawards.com/1999/posters/boys_dont_cry_ver1.jpg
http://www.cartoonstock.com/
The negative idea of "the other" is an inherent part of the social norms of western culture.
http://annansi.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/amex_red_ad.jpg
"…We are surrounded by homogenizing and normalizing images-images whose
content is far from arbitrary, but is instead suffused with the dominance of
gendered, racial, class, and other cultural iconography." (Bordo, 250)
http://radio.about.com/od/howardstern/ig/Howard-Stern-Photos/Howard-Stern-in-Drag.htm
"...yet what determines the
effect of realness is the
ability to compel belief, to
produce the naturalized
effect. This effect is itself the
result of an embodiment of
norms, a reiteration of
norms, and impersonation of
a racial and class norm, a
norm which is at once a
figure, a figure of a body,
which is no particular body,
but a morphological ideal
that remains the standard
which regulates the
performance, but which no
performance fully
approximates." (Butler 129)
"Through the pursuit of an
ever-changing,
homogenizing, elusive
ideal of femininity-a
pursuit without
terminus…female bodies
become docile bodiesbodies whose forces and
energies are habituated to
external regulation,
subjection, transformation,
"improvement."" (Bordo,
166)
"Dominant discourses
of feminine fitness
represent the female
body as a consuming
body, a body that is
limited in its
productivity because it
cannot "work off"
consumption easily.
Eating is seen as a
particularly enticing
indulgence for women
that must be controlled
not only through
exercise but also
through
dieting."(Gremillion,
55)
http://images.jupiterimages.com/common/detail/35/86/22778635.jpg
"The general tyranny of
fashion-perpetual, elusive,
and instructing the female
body in a pedagogy of
personal inadequacy and lackis a powerful discipline for
the normalization of all
women in this culture."
(Bordo, 254)
Women have been transformed into a commodity
http://www.calikartel.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/dolceandgabbana07.jpg
Source: April 2, 2012 Instructor: Sarah Whetstone (next 7 slides)
•“Discourse” – The categories of knowledge that form
our consciousness. The scope of what is “knowable.” A
way of seeing the world that implies the organization of
power.
•Discourses are limiting as well as enabling
– “Discourse can be both an instrument of power and
an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling
block, a point of resistance and a starting point for
an opposing strategy”
•Examples
– Mental illness and the birth of “the clinic”
– Punishment and the birth of “the prison”
– Sexuality
“The History of Sexuality”
• In the 18th and 19th centuries, sexuality became
an object of scientific knowledge and social
concern
• Repressive Hypothesis – Victorian-era controls
sought to repress human sexuality and desire.
• Foucault argued against the “repressive
hypothesis.”
–
–
–
–
–
Repression was actually an “incitement” to sex
More focus on sex, more discussion
Tightening of laws  sexual perversion
Sex seen as secretive, suspicious  obsession
Establishment of powerful categories of
normal/abnormal
• Power is productive.
“The History of Sexuality”
• In the 18th and 19th centuries, sexuality became
an object of scientific knowledge and social
concern
• Repressive Hypothesis – Victorian-era controls
sought to repress human sexuality and desire.
• Foucault argued against the “repressive
hypothesis.”
–
–
–
–
–
Repression was actually an “incitement” to sex
More focus on sex, more discussion
Tightening of laws  sexual perversion
Sex seen as secretive, suspicious  obsession
Establishment of powerful categories of
normal/abnormal
• Power is productive.
Foucault, History of Sexuality:
“A singularly confessing
society”
The Confessional Box
•
•
•
•
•
Justice
Medicine, psychiatry
Education
Family relationships
Love relations
The Roman Catholic tradition of Confession:
Typically the penitent begins the confession by saying,
"Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It has been [time
period] since my last confession." The penitent then must
confess mortal sins in order to restore his/her connection
to God's grace and not to merit Hell.
The Confession as Double
Subjection
Subject
As person under the rule of
authority
Subject (Subjectivity)
As person with a narrative,
identity who testifies, brings their
own Actions, Thoughts, Desires,
Experiences to light
“The Confession” in Therapy
* Psychiatrist – patient
creates a power
dynamic (subject of
power)
* Discourse of normalabnormal established
(Subjectivity through
discourse)
* Productive power
Characteristics of Power-as-Productive
• A new theory of power: Power is not restricted to
political or economic elites, nor is it narrowly
defined by repression.
• Power is productive, focused on the power to
administer and regulate life, rather than bring
death
• Not a fixed property held by certain groups
• Decentralized, diffuse
• Fluid and present in all interactions
• Where power is exercised, resistance develops.