Foucault News

Waller, C.
‘Darker than the Dungeon’: Music, Ambivalence, and the Carceral Subject
(2018) International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 31 (2), pp. 275-299.

DOI: 10.1007/s11196-018-9558-9

Abstract
Music’s sanctioned role in the day-to-day running of the ‘late-modern’ prison is to ensure wellbeing and compliance of prisoners, with most regimes facilitating access to music through the form of radios, cd’s, and cassette players. As a result, music often comes tied to judgements by the regime about prisoners’ conduct, with incentive systems allowing the regime to confiscate earned possessions under certain conditions. In this way, the role of music in prison is often continuous with the mechanisms of carceral control, with its ‘humanising’ or ‘therapeutic’ effects being defined as a luxury to be earned through good behaviour and critical engagement with one’s moral and psychological treatment. By tracing the history of music during the birth of the modern prison in the nineteenth century, this paper asks how music became incorporated into the discourse and technology of the emerging carceral state. Drawing principally on the work of Michel Foucault, this paper seeks to explore the relationship between music and ‘the self’ as it is applied to carceral subjects. Foucault shows how the expansion of the carceral state at the end of the nineteenth century relied on the production of knowledge about the subject through the application of disciplinary techniques. By exploring the construction of the self through the discourse of music at the end of the eighteenth century and in the published works of carceral reformers at the end of the nineteenth century, this paper seeks to explore the role that music played within this period of carceral expansion. The discussion will focus on the ways in which music acts as a conduit for forms of carceral power through its relationship with the self. © 2018, The Author(s).

Author Keywords
Carceral; Music; Prison; Subject

Mameni, S.
What are the Iranians wishing for? Queer transnational solidarity in revolutionary Iran
(2018) Signs, 43 (4), pp. 955-978.

DOI: 10.1086/696628

Abstract
This article explores the role of desire in Iran’s revolutionary movement. In a series of essays on the 1979 revolution, Michel Foucault asked, “What are the Iranians dreaming about?” This article takes up this question to consider the place of dreams in the formation of revolutionary subjects who find themselves displaced and marginalized within the social fabric. I argue that Foucault’s “repressive hypothesis,” which he developed as he wrote about the uprising in Iran, encourages us to read Islam not as a repressive force but as a site of desire that animated anti-imperialist political action in Iran. I enter this conversation though the audiovisual archives of North American feminists Kate Millett and Sophie Keir, who traveled to Iran in 1979 as a gesture of feminist solidarity. While their archive documents their own alienation, displacement, and eventual expulsion from Iran, it nonetheless provides a view of transnational homosocial strategies that enabled feminist resistance to gendered oppression in Iran. I revisit this failed historical moment of global sisterhood, and Muslim dreaming, to ask if there is a critical agency in desiring that can be used by displaced subjects to create new social movements.

Stehr, N., Adolf, M.T.
Knowledge/Power/Resistance
(2018) Society, 55 (2), pp. 193-198.

DOI: 10.1007/s12115-018-0232-3

Abstract
Francis Bacon’s famous metaphor that knowledge is power has been the intellectual springboard for many scholars to offer misleading observations about the inordinate authority and power of knowledge. Among the important implications that Bacon derives from his metaphor is the assertion that individuals provided with experimental skills and practical knowledge are those most entitled to hold executive office, rather than the aristocracy of blood. In this essay, we critically analyze Michel Foucault’s ambivalent version of the closeness of knowledge, power and authority. © 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

Author Keywords
Domination; Foucault; Knowledge; Power; Resistance; Sociology of knowledge

Kawasaka, K.
Contradictory Discourses on Sexual Normality and National Identity in Japanese Modernity
(2018) Sexuality and Culture, 22 (2), pp. 593-613.

DOI: 10.1007/s12119-017-9485-z

Abstract
This paper aims to analyse the relationship between discourses of gender/sexuality and construction of national identity and normativity in Japan. Firstly, I will analyse discourses of two influential theorists of queer studies, Michel Foucault and Eve K. Sedgwick, examining how Western cultural identity and modernity have been represented through sexuality and geography in their discussion. Secondly, I will review representations of gender and sexual normality and deviances in pre-war Japan, arguing how contradictory discourses and representation of gender and sexual norms were constructed with Japanese national identity through cultural differences between Japan and the West, or Japanese tradition and Westernisation. Finally, I will examine political functions of contradictory discourses of gender/sexual normativity against sexual minorities including within contemporary ‘LGBT-friendly’ discourses in Japanese society. Through these discussions, I will point out: firstly, Japanese modern gender and sexual normativity has been sustained by contradictory discourses and confusing cultural distinctions between Japan and the West, rather than definitive transitions towards Westernisation and clear cultural distinctions between Japan and the West; secondly, how these contradictory discourses of definitions of hetero/homosexuality and differences between Japan and the West have politically functioned against sexual minorities even now. Thus, I suggest that it is more fruitful for sexuality studies in/about Japan to focus on contradictory discourses, their historical and social contexts, and power dynamism rather than seeking the solutions for these contradictions. © 2017, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

Author Keywords
Asian modernity; Japanese masculinity; Japanese modernity; Japanese nationalism; Nanshoku; Queer in Japan; Samurai

Index Keywords
female, geography, homosexuality, human, identity, Japan, male, masculinity, sexual minority, social environment

Macedo, E.
WADA and imperialism? A philosophical look into anti-doping and athletes as coloniser and colonised
(2018) International Journal of Sport Policy, pp. 1-13. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1080/19406940.2017.1383930

Abstract
Post-colonial philosophical scholarship in the late 20th century advanced notions of exploitation and domination of the periphery post imperialistic control. Works by authors Peter Ekeh and Edward Said describe the institutional behaviour and ideology of a modern imperialist system. Additionally, Michel Foucault’s analysis of power helps explain how imperialist systems deploy what Foucault called juridical power for the domination of subjects. Drawing from these authors helps expose the practical and ethical complications of an imperialist model. This paper uses these insights to show that the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) provides an analogous case of an imperialist system and how the practical and ethical flaws of mirroring this system serve as an ineffective and unethical model for anti-doping. Among the many issues related to mirroring an imperialist system, the majority of problems stem from the divide that emerges between anti-doping enforcers and athletes. Ultimately the paper offers a potential solution to the problems, concluding with Maria Lugones’ idea of playful world travelling as an imperative first step and shift in ideology towards restructuring the anti-doping movement. Lugones’ idea of playful world travelling promotes the immersion of people. This immersion can close the divide between anti-doping enforcers and athletes. © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

Author Keywords
anti-doping; Doping; imperialism; internal colonialism; juridical power; juridico-discursive power