Foucauldian Disciplinary Power on Homosexuality

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This paper is on how discipline power, according to Michel Foucault’s project, objectifies human subjects and how it works to separate, watch and control the homosexual through cases in some dramas. The requirement of conformity is a basic principle for power to sustain the reign of itself. This principle exists universally in modern social life. Following this principle, disciplinary power finds out the variants and corrects them. Inspired by the administrative measure to control the contagion of the plague in the 17th century and the panopticon designed by Jeremy Bentham, Foucault sees two means of discipline in modern social life, that is, surveillance and normalization. Since such mechanism is a total one in all the aspects of the society, the characters in the dramas, as gays, all suffer from various oppressions from the force of conformity. They are labeled as human monsters and had to receive the surveillance and correction inside the system. In spite of many efforts of the characters, it should be realized that what homosexuality goes against is not power in itself but the distribution of power relations, in which they are at a disadvantaged place, and that in most cases the efforts are being done in the net of power relations.