Foucault News

Jun, M.
The Creation of a Docile Body: What Makes the Practice of Chhaupadi Persistent?
(2022) Asian Women, 38 (1), pp. 107-126.

DOI: 10.14431/aw.2022.3.38.1.107

Abstract
Chhaupadi is a Nepalese patriarchal custom that prohibits menstruating women from participating in daily routines, such as entering houses and temples, touching living plants, cattle, and taps, and eating dairy products. This has led to a number of unfavorable outcomes that threaten the health and safety of women and their babies, leading to it being officially outlawed in 2005. Despite this, the practice persists. Through in-depth interviews with 11 women from a small village in Dhanshingpur, where all residents continue to follow the rules of chhaupadi, this paper explores the complicated mechanisms that maintain the practice of chhaupadi and how it is being reasoned and regulated. In doing so, the paper grounds its discussions in Foucault’s conceptualizations of power, ultimately arguing that power can continue to compel compliance with illegal practices through self-regulation and the effect of community surveillance. © 2022, Research Institute of Asian Women. All rights reserved.

Author Keywords
biopower; chhaupadi; Foucault; menstruation taboo; self-discipline

Shai Gortler, The sumud within: Walid Daka’s abolitionist decolonization. Contemporary Polital Theory (2022).
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-021-00537-2

Abstract
The texts of Walid Daka, a Palestinian political prisoner incarcerated since 1986, challenge the notion that colonial power ends with decolonization and expose the shortcomings of examining colonial prisons solely through the eliminatory prism of death and deprivation. Studying Daka’s texts, the article presents how the Israeli carceral system has managed to utilize prisoners’ hopes and longings – in their relations with one another, their political actions such as hunger strikes or their building of internal leadership hierarchies, and their affective worlds – to further its own goals. Rather than a pessimistic account, this article critically analyzes Daka’s writings to demonstrate how a first-person study of carceral subjectification can unfold within an activist framework. Daka uses these observations to develop an alternative articulation of decolonization that I term ‘abolitionist decolonization’ as a collective and continued insistence on setting the terms of getting free. By ‘abolitionist decolonization,’ I conjure a difficult conversation between a Fanonian project of never-ending decolonization and a Foucauldian project of never-ending abolition. As such, this critical attitude aims to counter settler-colonial carcerality in ways that will foil the administration’s attempts to reproduce the dangers that the prisoners seek to elude, through the very means they deploy to elude them.

Shai Gortler, (2022). Participatory panopticon: Thomas Mott Osborne’s prison democracy. Constellations, 00, 1– 16.
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12641
Open access

Thomas Mott Osborne’s early-20th-century experiment in prison democracy shows us how domination can be disguised as participation. Osborne knew a thing or two about disguise. As the mayor of Auburn, NY, he would go about his business in disguise to eavesdrop on citizens’ conversations. When the Governor of New York asked him to prepare railroad reform recommendations, Osborne dressed as a “hobo” and snuck onto trains. As a cautionary measure, he had “TMO, Auburn, NY” tattooed on his arm so that he could be identified in case of an accident and he did, indeed, die in costume, in 1926 (Chamberlain, 1935; Tannenbaum, 1933).

[…]
Foucault’s conceptualization of productive power is key to questioning how a person’s actions, even if participatory, can be used to extend control over them. Discipline and Punish (1977) differentiates between subjection (sujétion) as the mere use of force versus subjectification (assujettissement) as subject formation that relies on the subject’s action. For this reason, Discipline and Punish is central to the proposal presented here to reevaluate participatory practices. Yet, to achieve this goal also requires revisiting Foucault’s work. Despite the framing of Discipline and Punish around principles of productive power, the book’s periodization (roughly 1790−1830) leads it to focus on penological theories that left little room for incarcerated people’s actions or interrelations. If Foucault suggests that we utilize Bentham’s panopticon design to locate “panopticism” as a “generalizable model of functioning” (Foucault, 1977, p. 205), then reading Osborne’s participatory panopticon reveals even more sophisticated control mechanisms.
[…]

Macherey, Pierre. “Did Foucault Find a ‘Way Out’ of Hegel?” Theory, Culture & Society, (June 2022). https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764221084903.

Abstract
A ‘way out’ expresses a movement which looks completely different depending on whether one views it prospectively or retrospectively: in the first instance, it signifies ‘to emerge from’, which suggests a relationship of continuity; in the second it signifies ‘to breach a threshold’, a distancing, that is to say, a rupture. Which of these two meanings should we ascribe to the expression ‘Foucault’s way out of Hegel’ – that of a connection, which emerges when we look behind us, or that of a disjunction, which appears when we look ahead? That of a line of descent, which obliges us to contend with a legacy, or that of rejection, thus a refusal to accept it? This is the very question that we want to confront.

Keywords
dialectic, Foucault, Hegel, subjectification, thought