Michel Foucault

In Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault, the author shows how over time punishment has changed. Specifically, he notes that punishment has moved away from targeting the body, and instead, now focuses on the soul. This change led to the idea that it was not only important to determine who committed the crime, but also why, as it would give greater insight into the problem, and offer better solutions. As such, I argue that if you follow Foucault’s analysis of how and why punishment changed it…

and how are members of the society expected to behave accordingly? Sociologist like Durkheim, believe that even though punishment is not institutionalised has existed in every society, therefore the presence of it in society is accepted. Whereas Foucault believes that punishment is a concept that has collated to…

their control. Michel Foucault states that…

The idea of privacy is not new to many people and was generally through of as a good thing until the government tried to convince us otherwise. Using the work of Michal Foucault and Noam Chomsky we see that the idea of mass surveillance for good is skewed and is being used for power and leverage over the population. I believe mass surveillance is an issue to be concerned about and through evidence presented in Glenn Greenwald’s TED talk on privacy. Glenn Greenwald’s TED talk entitled Why…

by nature? Whether power is good or not depends on who holds it. As Rich illustrates in her poem, power can be good for others but could be damaging to oneself. Power, however, cannot be possessed–but instead it can posses. With the words of Michel Foucault to back this up, power is not a possession, rather, it is the relationship between entities that determines knowledge and discourse to constitute society and our individual identities. We can direct power and influence it, but we can never…

This is also an issue for boys, body performance in particular is crucial to their ability to maintain a hegemonic masculine identity (Mac an Ghaill 1996). Similarly, dis- identification with other male students becomes the norm otherwise their masculine identities can be questioned and may be called a ‘poof’. Hyams (2000) demonstrates the highly gendered character of school cultures in her study of young Latina women in Los Angeles, she demonstrates the integral relationship between their…

Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison is an example of how knowledge can allow an individual to gain the power to dictate history. Foucault affirms his thoughts on power, knowledge, and its relation to history through the creation of discipline-mechanisms. He uses the example of the Panopticism where an…

Panopticism theory is a social theory that was called after the Panopticon. Michel Foucault, a French philosopher, was the developer of the term “Panopticon” and he used that term in his book, Discipline and Punish. The book was published in 1975 in France and it was one of Foucault’s important books. The book explained what the Panopticon is and the Panopticism used in it. During the 20’th century, Panopticism was used a lot in many different places with different techniques to eliminate threat…

Gender norms In everyday interactions, whether our gender may or may not be questioned, people still “do” gender by subscribing and conforming to the gender roles, identities and attributes of the gender binary (West & Zimmerman, 1987). When people do not conform to the gender binary, as some queer activists and some transgender people may not, gender still affects individuals. In Western societies, a key aspect of masculine and feminine identities (a “proper man” and “proper woman”), is to…

“Crime, the object with which the penal practice is concerned, has profoundly altered; the quality, the nature, in a sense the substance of which the punishable element is made, rather than its formal definition (Foucault 17).” Originally, the punitive system evaluated crimes based upon juridical code violation. An investigation was conducted to prove the offender’s physical responsibility in the act. But late eighteenth century theoreticians altered the objective of the punitive system.…