Foucault News

Thomas, Andrea S. (2012). “Michel de Ghelderode, the Wooster Group, and postmodernist revisions of La tentation de saint Antoine”.  Orbis litterarum , 67 (2), p. 136-53.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1600-0730.2011.01046.x

Abstract
La tentation de saint Antoine initially recalls Hieronymus Bosch’s famous Renaissance painting or Flaubert’s onieric work-in-progress. A closer look at more recent adaptations of the story of Saint Anthony the Great, however, reveals that such transformations of the myth addressed shifting aesthetics in the twentieth century by combining genres and texts, designed to cast what Foucault considered Flauberts most modernist ideas in an entirely postmodern light. This paper examines two of these adaptations: first, Michel de Ghelderode’s multiple versions of the tale set in Flanders, published separately from 1919 to 1932, but not performed until 1957 as a radio play and marionette show; and, second, the Wooster Groups provocative stage adaptation, which transplanted the hermit Anthony to an excess-filled New York of the eighties in Frank Dell’s The Temptation of Saint Antony.

What Flaubert created as a self-reflexive commentary on the dangers of books, twentieth-century adaptors turned into a postmodern statement about other contemporary media forms, including stage, radio, cinema, and television. More importantly, by strategically appropriating not only Flaubert’s subject matter, but also his composition technique and passages from his texts, these artists draw attention to the perils of a culture-saturated twentieth century in which art had become adaptation.

Cox, Barbara; Pringle, Richard (2012). “Gaining a foothold in football: A genealogical analysis of the emergence of the female footballer in New Zealand”. International review for the sociology of sport, 47 (2), pp. 217-34.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1012690211403203

Abstract
In this article we adopted Foucault’s genealogical approach to examine the emergence of the female footballer in the early 1970s. Results from in-depth interviews and document analyses indicated that these female footballers were discursively constructed as submissive, heterosexual, non-feminists, who were supportive of male football and entertainment. We relatedly argue, in a seemingly paradoxical manner, that female footballers emerged into the male domain because they were disciplined by discourses of normalized femininity and, as such, were understood as bodies not worthy of serious consideration. The power effect of this positioning was that female football was not perceived as a threat to the existing gender order and, accordingly, there was no need to invest political concern or future money to their existence. This miscalculation, or accident of history, provided a window of opportunity that allowed the neophyte players to taste the pleasures of ‘running with the ball at their feet’ and to develop a love of the game. We concluded that the pleasure that these women gained from their involvement in football, plus the prevailing discourses of liberal feminism, acted as productive forces that enabled them to endure and eventually challenge gender inequities.

Purabi Bose, Bas Arts, Han van Dijk, (2012). “‘Forest governmentality’: A genealogy of subject-making of forest-dependent ‘scheduled tribes’ in India”. Land use policy, 29 (3), pp. 664-73.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2011.11.002

Abstract
This paper analyses the historical trajectories of both British colonial rule and independent India to categorise scheduled tribes and to appropriate and legalise forests in tribal areas. It builds upon Foucault’s notion of governmentality to argue that the history of the scheduled tribes’ subject-making and the related history of forest demarcation is indispensable for understanding the current politics of decentralised forest management in India. Three dimensions of ‘forest governmentality’ – the history of categorisation, the politics of social identity, and the technologies of forest governance – are discussed to show how recent efforts to politicise forest tenure rights have reinforced political control over the scheduled tribes through new forms of authority, inclusion and exclusion. However, to claim their individual and community right to forestland and resources, the scheduled tribes have internalised their ‘new’ ethnic identity, thereby creating countervailing power and room to manoeuvre within the current forest governance regime. This is supported by a case study of the Bhil, a predominantly forest-dependent scheduled tribe in the semi-arid region of western India.