Docile Bodies

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Foucault's Discipline and Punish is fundamentally an account of the way power shifted in the 17th and 18th centuries away from the external discipline of the body (e.g., torture) toward various forms of internal discipline that involve the compliance and active participation of the subject. Foucault's account begins with a case study description of the torture of the criminal Robert-François Damiens to illustrate the apparent brutality and ultimately depict the strangeness of these kinds of practices to the modern reader. He then goes on to show how the relatively rapid movement away from these kinds of disciplinary practices toward those of the regulated life is characterized by the 19th-century prison. In other words, the development of humane institutions” had less to do with softening the treatment of deviance than with the efficiency and effectiveness of compelling the deviant to develop what Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills called “internal whips.”

There has been considerable misunderstanding of what Foucault meant by docile body. Often this is interpreted to mean that bodies are constrained and restrained in contemporary prisons through a kind of brainwashing. This critique misses the central point that the docile body is a productive body in the sense that it is carefully taught how to appear and how to behave rather than being left in what might be considered a “wild” state only to be brutalized when it gives offense to power. The production of the docile body in Foucault's analysis is not a body that does not move or that is inactive in any real sense; instead, the docile body is one that is under the control of its possessor in alignment with norms and more or less subtle forms of regulation that are learned and developed through training rather than through the application of external force. The idea of biopower, or control of the body, refers to those knowledges, practices, and training regimens that educate the subject about how to appear and act.

The docile body is not marked, broken, or bru-talized; in fact, it is the intact and healthy appearance of the body that has become an embodiment of an important sign of the power of regulation. Indeed, the regulated body takes on the appearance of what we have come to call “healthy” to the extent that regulated bodies are understood as representing the way that people are naturally supposed to be. The regulative moves that have [Page 316]produced this body are thus obscured as regulation and assigned to nature. Power, then, is applied in multiple and subtle ways by the acting subject rather than through external means of control that Foucault exemplified in his discussion of torture. We come to desire self-regulation, for example, in exercise regimens, health literature and discourses, or through reading gendered men's and women's magazines. Although in Discipline and Punish Foucault used the idea of “normalization” to describe this general phenomenon of control, he later called this disciplinary power by the name of biopower. Biopower, then, marks an important shift from the application of restrictive force to the production of a reflective self. Power, then, is productive, multiple, and situational rather than coercive, uniform, and centralized. Knowledgeable subjects internalize and reproduce through disciplined, thoughtful, practice constructions of the self that themselves reflect knowledge about what is proper, correct, educated, sophisticated, and sane.

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