Clinical Gaze Essay

The emergence of biomedicine and the development of medical technologies created a new form of medical practice, clinical gaze. In Foucault’s concept of clinical gaze, medical practice and the power relationship between doctors and their patients have been transformed (1973). Foucault says “‘facilitated by the medical technologies that frame and focus the physicians’ optical grasp of the patient, the medical gaze abstracts the suffering person from her sociological context and reframes her as a “case” or a “condition”(Ibid., 23). The idea of clinical gaze has the power to influence social norms and perceptions of particular human abnormalities. Using the clinical gaze, psychiatrists systematically and biologically see patient’s conditions, …show more content…
Throughout the interviews, shame and anxiety among university students are nature in Japanese society as a whole. As Foucault describes, “madness is the false punishment of a false solution, but by its own virtue it brings to light the real problem, which can then be truly resolved” (1965,33). Foucault’s description of the cultural construct of madness and its link to women’s “weakness, dreams and illusions” in cultural discourse offer a critical assessment of an ideology that reinforce socially acceptable displays of sexuality and behaviours among women (1956, 26). This Foucault’s view of madness provides a critical framework from which to understand how lunchmate syndrome is identified, represented and understood within the cultural system. In terms of Foucault’s emphasise on cultural and social discourses of understanding of madness, the youth generation’s weakness and their representations of high levels of anxiety and fear are seen as problematic and even mental disorders in Japanese society. However, the syndrome represents the more complex nature of Japanese