Foucault News

Black Hawk Hancock, Michel Foucault and the Problematics of Power: Theorizing DTCA and Medicalized Subjectivity, The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy: A Forum for Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine, Volume 43, Issue 4, 9 July 2018, Pages 439–468.

DOI: 10.1093/jmp/jhy010

Abstract
This article explores Foucault’s two different notions of power: one where the subject is constituted by power–knowledge relations and another that emphasizes how power is a central feature of human action. By drawing out these two conceptualizations of power, Foucault’s work contributes three critical points to the formation of medicalized subjectivities: (1) the issue of medicalization needs to be discussed both in terms of both specific practices and holistically (within the carceral archipelago); (2) we need to think how we as human beings are “disciplined” and “subjectivated” through medicalization, as discourses, practices, and institutions are all crystallizations of power relations; and (3) we need to reflect on how we can “resist” this process of subjectification, since “power comes from below” and patients shape themselves through “technologies of the self.” Ultimately, Foucault’s work does not merely assist us in refining our analysis; rather, it is essential for conceptualizing medicalization in contemporary society.

Keywords
carceral archipelago, Foucault, gaze, medicalization, technology of the self

Lesley Ellis,
Through a filtered lens: unauthorized picture-taking of people with dwarfism in public spaces
(2018) Disability and Society, 33 (2), pp. 218-237.
https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2017.1392930

Abstract
People with dwarfism often encounter discrimination in their daily interactions with strangers. Staring, harassment and infantilization are some of the behaviours they have reported to encounter. Through two qualitative research studies conducted in 2013 and 2015/16 it was revealed that people with dwarfism also experience strangers taking unauthorized pictures of them. This article explores this phenomenon in depth, utilizing the perspective of individuals who have experienced it first hand and analysing the relevant socio-historical influences. These include the history of the photographic exploitation of ‘abnormal’ bodies, and the cultural construction of a ‘dwarf’ as an object of entertainment. This article engages gaze theories in gender and race and ethnicity studies as well as a discussion of Foucault’s interpretation of the ‘panopticon’, positing that the advent of the cell-phone camera in the twenty-first century has altered how ‘abnormal’ bodies are recorded within oppressive ideological beliefs. © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
abnormality; culture; disability; Dwarfism; gaze

Scott Hamilton (2018). Foucault’s End of History: The Temporality of Governmentality and its End in the Anthropocene. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 46(3), 371-395.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829818774892

Abstract
Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality is widely used throughout the social sciences to analyse the state, liberalism, and individual subjectivity. Surprisingly, what remains ignored are the repeated claims made by Foucault throughout his seminal Security, Territory, Population lectures (2007) that governmentality depends more fundamentally on a specific form of time, than on the state or the subject. By paying closer attention to Foucault’s comments on political temporality, this article reveals that governmentality emerged from, and depends upon, a very specific cosmological order that experiences time as indefinite: what Foucault calls our modern ‘indefinite governmentality’. This is elaborated here in three ways. First, by reviewing the transformation from a linear Christian cosmology to our modern indefinite governmentality through what Foucault calls the ‘de-governmentalization of the cosmos’. Second, by arguing that our experience of indefinite temporality was concretised by the geological discovery of ‘deep time’. Third, by engaging a contemporary geological concept that returns humanity to its lost cosmological centrality, thereby re-governing the cosmos: the Anthropocene, or the ‘human epoch’. Analysed using indefinite governmentality, Foucault’s forewarning of an ‘end of history’ is implicit in the new concept of the Anthropocene’s origins and ends. If it is the paradigm shift its proponents claim, then it threatens to end the temporality of the state, the subject, and governmentality itself. © 2018, The Author(s) 2018.

Author Keywords
Anthropocene; governmentality; political temporality

Burchardt, M.
Governing religious identities: law and legibility in neoliberalism
(2018) Religion, pp. 1-17. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1080/0048721X.2018.1482611

Abstract
This article explores from a Foucauldian perspective how, in the neoliberal age, religious diversity has become a new form of governmentality that is based on practices of classifying and categorizing people according to religious criteria. Contributing to studies on religion and marketization, the article explores how religious diversity is promoted as a category of social order and coexistence and develops two ideas: first, religious diversity is a legal-political form of governmentality geared towards rendering complex populations legible for administrative purposes. Second, religious diversity reflects an economic form of governmentality, in that its legal doctrinal cognates (subjective definitions of religion, sincerity of belief, etc.) call forth liberal notions of consumer choice. While both are premised on the idea that people have identities, there are potential tensions between both forms, as the first tends to favor collectives and the second favors individuals. The article is based on research in Spain and Canada. © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

Author Keywords
Foucault; governmentality; law; marketization; neoliberalism; Religious diversity; religious identity