Foucault News

Pezdek, K., Michaluk, T.
The functioning of the Polish Football Association from the perspective of Michel Foucault’s conception of exclusion
(2014) Soccer and Society. Article in Press.

Abstract
One of the management methods used by the Polish Football Association (PZPN) is management through exclusion. Due to such management, the Association constitutes to a considerable degree the status of individuals and institutions with which it enters into relations. As the essential criteria of these relations, the PZPN adopts utilitarian values, legal and business, diminishing the meaning of sport and moral values. From this perspective, the PZPN efficiently conducts the policy of exclusion it has created, dividing and rejecting those people and institutions who are incapable of contributing to the financial success of the Association. It also imposes various prohibitions on everybody who criticizes the workings of the organization or who accuses it of diminishing or even disregarding the interest of Polish football. For this purpose, the PZPN employs its policy of managing knowledge, which to a significant degree can be considered the propaganda of success.

DOI: 10.1080/14660970.2014.919274

Ragan Fox
Auto-archaeology of Homosexuality: A Foucauldian Reading of the Psychiatric–Industrial Complex, Text and Performance Quarterly, Vol. 34, Iss. 3, 2014, 230-250.

Abstract
This essay explores two primary questions. (1) Can there be a Foucauldian autoethnography? (2) How might a Foucault-driven autoethnography detail my experiences in the psychiatric–industrial complex? Pulling largely from Michel Foucault’s earliest work History of Madness, I look at how interconnected organizations have rendered homosexuality as senseless, used a “psychiatrization of perverse pleasure” to rationalize this senselessness, and relied on expensive psychoanalysis and pharmaceuticals to invoke the madness they claim to cure.

Keywords

Autoethnography,
Foucault,
Homophobia,
Homosexuality,
Psychiatry

DOI: 10.1080/10462937.2014.903429

Chris Howard, Jenny Hallam and Katie Brady, Governing the souls of young women: exploring the perspectives of mothers on parenting in the age of sexualisation, Journal of Gender Studies, Published online: 15 Sep 2014

Full PDF (will expire after 50 clicks)

Abstract

The sexualisation of young women has emerged as a growing concern within contemporary western cultures. This has provoked adult anxieties that young women are growing up too fast by adopting inappropriate sexual practices and subjectivities. Psychological discourses have dominated, which position sexualisation as a corrupting force that infects the ‘true self’ of young women, so they develop in abnormal ways. This in turn allows psychological practices to govern how to parent against sexualisation within families. To explore this further, six mothers each with daughters aged between 8 and 12 took part in one to one semi-structured interviews designed to explore how they conceptualised and parented against the early sexualisation of young women. A Foucauldian inspired discourse analysis was employed, which suggested that the mother’s talk was situated within a psychological discourse. This enabled sexualisation to be positioned as a corrupting force that disrupted the natural development of young women through deviant bodily practices (e.g. consuming sexualised goods), which prevented them from becoming their ‘true self’. Through the disciplinary gaze of psychology, class inequalities were reproduced where working class families were construed as ‘chavs’ who were bad parents and a site of contagion for sexualisation.

DOI: 10.1080/09589236.2014.952714

Ofer Parchev,
The body-power relationship and immanent philosophy: A question of life and death
(2014) European Legacy, 19 (4), pp. 456-470.
https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2014.919191

Abstract
According to Foucault, the human body is the targeted object of modern power systems. In his genealogical studies, Foucault describes the manner in which these power systems leave an imprint on the body and utilize knowledge of the body as an indirect means of exercising subtle forms of control. In recent years, several researchers have claimed that the status of the body, subsumed as it is by modern power networks, has become a means for conducting a unique political critique in which the human being is viewed as an agent of oppression and freedom. This article takes a fresh look at Foucault’s notions of life and death that underpin the critical understanding the body-power relationship. While this approach recognizes the completeness of subjective structuring processes, it also enables the formulation of new insights regarding the status of the modern individual as the subject of separate and independent modes of speech and action.