Foucault News

Michael, K.S.
Wearing your heart on your sleeve: the surveillance of women’s souls in evangelical Christian modesty culture
(2018) Feminist Media Studies, pp. 1-15. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2018.1490915

Abstract
A few years ago, a rash of online debates over whether Christian women should wear yoga pants spread across white evangelical blogs and social media. These were followed by conversations about the meaning of “modesty” more broadly, including who has the ability or authority to “read” women’s piety, or their very souls, through their dress. Drawing on media interface theories and close analyses of these debates, this article examines how some evangelical women resist the surveillant male gaze in their religious communities by implying that their modesty resides not in signs that are legible to others but in their own embodied experiences of pleasure and care. The article argues further that the case of white evangelical modesty culture offers an example of Foucault’s concept of the “soul” and the micro-physics of power that produce it, something that has been overlooked by the literature’s focus on the role of the state and corporations in surveillance. Moreover, absent a more capacious understanding of the sociality of surveillance, current approaches to biometric surveillance have also neglected important limits to surveillance that are suggested by evangelical women’s tactical resistance to the gendered politics of surveillance in their communities.

Author Keywords
clothing; Gender; media; religion; surveillance

Hay, J.
The automated states, automated government, and self-automation of the ‘smart’ appliance: three questions about refrigerators
(2018) Media International Australia, 166 (1), pp. 57-69.

DOI: 10.1177/1329878X17739014

Abstract
This essay considers the automation of the everyday through ‘smart’ domestic appliance, specifically the current regime of smart refrigerators. The essay revisits and rethinks perspectives about media by McLuhan, focusing particularly on his discussion of clothing, cars, clocks, light bulbs, and highways as ‘media’. The essay outlines a critical practice (a ‘critical refrigerator studies’), as a means of rethinking ‘media power’, through perspectives by Foucault about technologies of government and through perspectives by Otter about Liberal objects. © 2017, © The Author(s) 2017.

Author Keywords
automation; governmentality; Liberal objects; media; smart appliance

Jeihouni, M., Hooti, N.
“Because it is my name!”: Miller, Proctor, and Parrhesia in The Crucible
(2018) Orbis Litterarum, 73 (2), pp. 103-126.

DOI: 10.1111/oli.12158

Abstract
This article offers a Foucauldian reading of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Employing Foucault’s concept of parrhesia, we argue that John Proctor holds truth-telling as a moral virtue and accordingly his behavior qualifies as parrhesiastic based on the five elements Foucault outlines for parrhesia: frankness, truth, danger, criticism, and duty. First we shall provide a thorough account of the concept in Foucault’s work. Second, and on the basis of that account, we shall explore the relations of power in Miller’s play, arguing that Proctor deconstructs the self-celebrating dogmatism of his Puritan context with a razor-sharp honesty. We shall conclude that Proctor meets his death because of his parrhesiastic courage. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons A/S. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Author Keywords
Foucault; Miller; parrhesia; Proctor; The Crucible

Bjelić, D.I.
Toward a Genealogy of the Balkan Discourses on Race
(2018) Interventions, 20 (6), pp. 906-929.

DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2018.1492955

Abstract
The ongoing racist reception of immigrants by post-communist states previously known to be class conscious, internationalist, and egalitarian naturally raises the question: how is racism possible in societies with no colonial or interracial experience? It is fair to state that the critical discourse on race barely exists and is historically and theoretically alien to postsocialist historiography on the grounds that Eastern Europe and the Balkans did not have and never were colonies. An attempt to engage the postsocialist presence with postcolonial analysis and to introduce race into the postsocialist context remains for the most part foreclosed by postsocialist historiographies. And yet every one of these postsocialist countries had racial laws during World War II and readily shipped Jews to concentration camps; as soon as real socialism collapsed, class consciousness morphed overnight into rabid nationalism coupled with racist practices. So, race must have always been–in some capacity–part of Eastern European, and particularly of Balkan, history. Informed primarily by Michel Foucault’s genealogy of race discourses, I will interrogate the ways in which the Balkans instrumentalized class and ethnicity as race in the struggle over sovereign space. This essay examines the Balkans “racial formations” in relation to war, revolution, the science of eugenics, the serology of “blood type,” procreation, and the Marxist discourse on race. Rather than a “thing” of nature, the Balkan “race” is a “thing” of discourse. © 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
class; ethnicity; Foucault; Michel; race; war