GENDER AND WOMAN STUDIES

Discipline and Punish

October 1, 2012

GENDER AND WOMAN STUDIES

The work called Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault touches upon the theme of the evolution of the political technologies of the western society upon the transition from a feudalism era to the present time. If the criminals were subject to the public executions or tortures before, at present they are put under a careful prison supervision excluding any violence over a body. A social nature of punishment changed. The new idea of the subject of a crime was created; there was a rational and prudent attitude to a human body. A body of a prisoner ceased to be a subject of a crime; it is substituted with his soul. There are the theses about the tolerance to a prisoner and about a bigger intolerance to a crime. It is offered to extend the idea of inevitability of punishments in the consciousness of citizens for the prevention of crimes; the need for a mass prevention of crimes is considered. The punishment in the form of imprisonment, imposed under the law, has the main goal - correction of the prisoners soul through body. The labor is the best method of the improvement of the individuals. Labor includes the observance of the ideas of order, morality, respect to oneself and others. We have seen that, in penal justice, the prison transformed the punitive procedure into a penitentiary technique; the carceral archipelago transported this technique from the penal institution to the entire social body (Foucault: 1995). A feminine body is a popular object of the researches in the cultural feminism. The main idea, depicted in the works of Sandra Bartky, is concentrated in the fact that the modern culture has a set of the strategies, directed at the normalization of a womans soul through a discipline of a feminine body. The researcher studies the discursive strategies of the feminine body production and singles out the modern practices of a womans body normalization - a diet, fitness, makeup, etc.

GENDER AND WOMAN STUDIES

Women practice the discipline several times. They apply it towards own bodies and against them. Women, who check their makeup and hairstyles several times a day, who care for their bodies and are afraid to gain some kilograms, turn into prisoners, into the subjects supervising themselves; moreover, they are absorbed in the endless introspection. This introspection is the form of the submission to the patriarchate.

GENDER AND WOMAN STUDIES References Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage. 2nd edition.