Foucault's Notion Research Articles

Exploring the Different Interpretations of Shijing in Kongzi Shilun and Mao Poetry from Foucaults Notion of the Author Function

Foucault's notion of "Author Theory" was proposed after Barthes shouted that "the author is dead". Foucault believed that we should not only focus on the problem of the disappearance of the empty author, but also pay attention to the formal functions released with the disappearance of the author of the text, that is, the functional meaning of the author. Foucault's theory of "author function" has profound significance for modern literature, and also provides enlightenment for human research on early Chinese literature. Over the years, scholars have interpreted Shijing in many different ways. As one of the most respected interpretations of Shijing for more than 2,000 years, Mao Poetry represents the mainstream view of the academic community to a certain extent, and its historicized interpretation of poetry has a decisive influence in the literary world. Although Kongzi shilun has not been circulated in the world and was unearthed relatively late, its interpretation focusing on moral aspects has provided a new perspective for the academic community to understand poems. This article compares the interpretations of Shijing in Mao Poetry and Kongzi shilun, and explores the reasons for the different interpretations, namely the lack of the writing environment of Shijing, and combines with the two main ideological characteristics of the theory of "author function" to study the fluidity characteristics reflected in different interpretations of Shijing and the problem of "breaking a stanza off [from its context] to generate meaning" in the application of Shijing.

Negotiating between speech and silence as a form of agency: Understanding Dalit women's experiences of sexual violence in India

This article explores the complexities of non-disclosure among female Dalit survivors of rape who negotiate between speech and silence as a means of exercising agency. It analyses the role of Brahmanical patriarchy, Dalit feminism and social constructionist theory to unpack the silence, shame, secrecy and cultural censorship surrounding sex and sexual violence both in India at large and for Dalit women in particular. The study comprised 28 qualitative interviews with Dalit women who had been raped by men; it employs Foucault's notion of resistance, regulation and subjectivity to explore when and to whom these participants chose to disclose their rape. It thus seeks to theories these women's varied responses to their rape as acts of agency and resistance, demonstrating how silence can operate on multiple levels: individual, family and community. It draws on India's #LoSHA movement to demonstrate the dangers of universalizing victim-survivors' experiences of sexual violence and to parse the complexities of speaking out or remaining silent and how these play out in individual and collective contexts. In focusing on Dalit women and situating their non-disclosure within an intersectional context, this work differentiates between the passivity of being silenced and the agency and resistance inherent in the decision to remain silent. Therefore, this paper makes a unique contribution to the literature on patriarchy, Dalit studies, feminism and social constructivism.

‘One is allowed to show the reality’: The creation of panoptic structures in social media communication

Abstract This article aims to introduce the notion of panoptic structures as a way of theorizing how people strategically exploit the affordances of digital devices to expose other people's behavior. I argue that Foucault's notion of panopticism becomes relevant in new ways in social life as a consequence of the polymedia repertoires of networked individuals. Central here is the ability to store digital communication and repost it for selected audiences. The data I analyze here were collected from a group of students who had just entered the gymnasium (the Danish equivalent of high school). During the months of multi-sited, online and offline ethnography, a conflict occurred between two groups of students. During this conflict, a repeated activity involved students confronting students from the opposing group with screenshots of their earlier social media activities and doing so in front of larger audiences of other students. On this basis, I argue that a theory of such panoptic practices belongs in the sociolinguistic toolbox. (Panopticism, social media, conflict, polymedia repertoire, audience)*

Colonial governmentality and Bangladeshis in the anthropocene: Loss of language, land, knowledge, and identity of the Chakma in the ecology of the Chittagong Hill tracts in Bangladesh

“Can they do whatever they please. . . Turn settlements into barren land. Dense forests into deserts. Mornings into evenings. Turn fertile into barren. Why shall I not resist!. …. I become my whole self. . . Why shall I not resist”!. This is a section from a poem - ‘Joli No Udhim Kittei’ a Chakma poem written in Bengali script as ‘Rukhe Darabo Na Keno?’ (‘Why shall I not resist!’) by the author \Kabita Chakma in 1992, translated into English. It epitomizes the ongoing violation of human rights that Chakmas (members of one of the Indigenous communities in Bangladesh) experience in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) where the highest number of Indigenous people in Bangladesh live. In this paper, the first author, a member of the Chakma community and a Lecturer at an Australian university is in conversation with the second author, a Professor at a university in a Bangladeshi university. With reference to Phillipson’s linguicism, and Foucault's notion of governmentality in the era of the Anthropocene, in their conversation, they reflect on the Anthropocene – the forced migration, displacement of Indigenous communities in Bangladesh from their traditional land, extinction of Indigenous languages, disengagement with Indigenous and local languages, and consequently, and the destruction of biodiversity of Chittagong Hill Tracts.

Doing isolation – Caring Citizens. A cross-country comparative analysis of patient experiences with isolation practices during the early phase of the Covid-19 pandemic

The aim of this article is to investigate isolation experiences of individuals affected by Covid-19 and explore how care practices were enacted or upheld under the particular policies of the pandemic. Conceptually we draw upon Foucault's notion of biopolitics and scholarship on ‘care practices’ and ‘carescapes’. We are interested in how theoretical ideas such as ‘containing the virus’ or ‘flattening the curve,’ as part of policies of ‘pandemic management,’ shaped lived realities and influenced practices and understandings of care. We reviewed qualitative interviews with individuals who were ill with Covid-19 in 2020/2021 from seven countries that we analyzed comparatively across emerging themes with a Foucauldian lens on biopolitics.The idea of ‘carescapes,’ suggests that ‘care’ and ‘policy’ intermingle, which allow us to bring to the fore what is silenced through the biopolitics of Covid-19. Carescapes are the embodied places of care where policies and regulations traverse from public into private spaces, effectively re-configuring the latter. To ‘do’ isolation in the context of Covid-19, carescapes were assembled with the help of material things such as, masks, disinfectants, doors and schedules; these served as boundaries that had to be sustained and navigated. ‘Doing isolation’ therefore presents a form of biopolitics that relies on individual citizenship and complex care practices required to chart the terrain created by the polices of the pandemic. Doing isolation was especially challenging because policies about safe spaces and safe practices were regularly changed as governments struggled to devise policies to contain the pandemic.

Whose city? (De)colonising the bodies of speculative fiction in Lauren Beukes's Zoo City

This article explores the (de)colonisation of the body and body boundaries in contemporary South African speculative fiction, paying particular attention to award-wining author, Lauren Beukes's, second novel, Zoo City (2010). I will apply Lara Cox's (2018:317) argument that 'Haraway's cyborg resembles the liminal view of identity presented by queer theory, which seeks to blur strict divisions between sexual and gender categories, dissolving binary oppositions such as woman/man and heterosexual/homosexual', to my reading of Zoo City. By centring the novel around Zinzi December, a resident of 'Zoo City' (the marginalised underbelly of Johannesburg), and situating the novel in the cradle of humankind, Beukes reacts against South Africa's colonial history and its colonisation of the body by blurring the animal-human boundary and challenging the colonial construct of body binaries. The novel can be read as a decolonial feminist text as it re-writes South Africa's apartheid history and critiques its division, separation and bodily segregation. Furthermore, I explore how fictional bodies are imagined and constructed in the text; I ask what kinds of boundary-breaking bodies predominate; and consider their thematic, narrative, and political significance in the postapartheid imaginary in relation to speculative fiction. I examine how new boundaries (particularly between 'normative' society and 'Zoo City') are formulated. Zoo City pulls into focus Kristeva's (1982) notion of the abject body as a central to its concerns, while also bringing attention to Foucault's (1992) notion of the 'disciplined' body. It foregrounds questions about the formulation and destabilisation of identity, with a particular focus on the construction of female identity. This article builds on the critical literature on the dystopian post-apartheid state by examining Zoo City's depictions of marginalised people and its construction of the body and body boundaries, as well as by extending the examination of representations of the body in speculative fiction.

“We are not labors; we are teachers”: Indonesian early childhood teachers’ organizations as a form of a panopticon

This paper aims to unpack the discourses of teachers’ professionalism and teachers’ organizations in the early childhood education settings in Indonesia. Using Foucault's notions of discourse and power, we are interested in exploring how both discourses have silenced the teachers. This paper adopts qualitative research conducted with nine teachers, all active members, and boards of ECE teachers’ organizations. The data were collected mainly through semi-formal interviews and focus group discussions. The data were analyzed using a thematic approach. The findings suggest how the teachers’ organization has acted as a form of panopticon that sustains the hegemonic definition of teachers’ professionalism. The findings also suggest that the teachers’ understanding of professionalism is also highly influenced by the local/Javanese values of halus, where teaching is seen as a noble and refined profession. Hence, teachers continue to create the binary between teaching and working. At the same time, the penetration of religious discourse has also situated them to accept their situation. This paper, therefore, serves as an invitation to rethink and reimagine the kind of policies and educational reform needed so that the teachers can have a space to voice their struggle.

Foucault's Docile Bodies Perspective: The Figure of Seniwati's Feminism in the Wido Documentary Film

Discussion of docile bodies has been absent in film analysis. Most research is attracted to study gender representation in which women are frequently underrepresented. Thus, this study aims to examine the documentary film of Wido, a female artist, through Michel Foucault's theory of docility. This research is attracted to Widowati's narration as a Javanese woman artist who must be able to manage between her profession as an artist and a housewife respectfully. The data are the narration and scenes of Wido as both a female artist and a housewife in the documentary movie “Wido”. All data obtained are analysed textually, applying Foucault's notion of docile bodies. The research argues that the representation of Wido challenges the notion of docile bodies. Despite Widowati still glorifying her domestic roles, the feminine prescription of which women should be responsible for domestic chores, she subsequently exchanges the domestic responsibility with her husband to work in public as an artist. She also acknowledges that she is the family's breadwinner without diminishing her husband's primary responsibility as the head of the family. The fluidity of gender roles she performs contradicts the notion of docile bodies in which women are always taught and supervised to glorify their femininity.

A multi-period analysis of a water management arena in the Italian Alps, circa 1951–2007: The territorialisation of environmental concerns

Water exploitation is at the centre of current social and environmental sustainability discourses, one form of which is hydropower. Intense damming of rivers and natural basins occurred in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe (and elsewhere). Following Miller and Power's concept of territorialisation and Foucault's notion of visibility, this study sheds light on the water management arena, read through changes in stakeholder objectives and accountabilities. Its focus is on the ‘accounts’ of environmental concerns, from post WWII to the new millennium. The analysis focuses on the case of the Santa Giustina dam in Northern Italy, using archival and oral-history approaches. It is shown how an increasing visibility of environmental concerns translated into a higher degree of ‘territorialisation’ through their itemisation in water quality and quantity parameters. This historical evolution informs policy makers, managers and society in general, about how to address profits and environmental issues regarding current water exploitation.

Female Subjectivity and Body Politics in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Zikora

This paper examines the pregnant female body in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Zikora. The protagonist's experiences of loneliness, abandonment and struggle during her pregnancy are situated within diverse socio-political relations, including patriarchy, sexuality, immigrant status, romance, transnational background and generation gaps. Drawing on critical insights from body politics, especially Elaine Scarry's concept of conscious body, Michel Foucault's notion of body discipline and Elizabeth Grosz's phenomenological reading of lived bodies, the analysis explores how the protagonist Adichie challenges the traditional understanding of the female body as a mere biological object. The paper argues that through her bodily experiences, the protagonist gains agency to critique and reassess gender relations and stereotypes. The journey of self-discovery and subjectivity emerges as the protagonist's aching body becomes a window to perceive existing relationships and meanings, resulting in a revitalized understanding of her own body and its significance.

POWER AND RESISTANCE IN TONI MORRISON'S SULA AND PARADISE: A FOUCAULDIAN STUDY

<p>Michel Foucault's notions of power and resistance are evocative as one attempt to explain the hitherto unexplained meaning of women's subjugation and resistance as represented in the patriarchal society in Toni Morrison's <em>Sula</em> and <em>Paradise</em>. The patriarchal agents in these novels enforce white beauty standards, dictate women's roles and behaviors, emphasize marriage and motherhood, and use sexual exploitation to control women. Research has shown that both novels have received widespread critical attention, exploring themes including the politics of maternal violence, counter-memory, biopower, internal racism, and colonialism. However, a comparative study of <em>Sula</em> and <em>Paradise</em> through Foucault's concepts of disciplinary power and constant surveillance may reveal the subtle ways power operates in patriarchal societies, and by analyzing the female characters' resistance strategies, the study may uncover how women challenge and resist patriarchal norms. Employing the textual analysis method and Foucault's ideas of power and resistance, this research aims to determine how the women of Morrison's <em>Sula</em> and <em>Paradise</em> suffer oppression due to patriarchal disciplinary power and constant surveillance in their community, which ultimately triggers their resistance.</p><p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/soc/0026/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Theater as a Site of Resistance in Haresh Sharma's Good People: Questioning Authorities and Contesting Truths in the Clinic.

Good People, by Singaporean playwright Haresh Sharma, unmasks racial and religious tensions between Singapore's increasingly diverse racial groups and the attendant ramifications on the healthcare ecosystem and the doctor-patient relationship. Drawing upon Michel Foucault's notion of heterotopia, this paper argues that, in Good People, Sharma employs theater as a site of resistance by calling into question state and medical authority. First, state authority is challenged through the play's scrutiny of the ideological principle of multiculturalism and its usefulness in fostering meaningful cross-cultural exchanges and acceptance of different cultural and religious beliefs in the clinic. Second, the play destabilizes medical authority by surfacing the complex relationship between the doctor's unconscious biases, racial and religious prejudice, and clinical judgment, thereby casting doubt on medicine's claims of objectivity. In doing so, this paper argues, the play resists simplistic binary categorizations of the behaviors and motivations of the characters into good/bad or right/wrong, instead raising questions about power, knowledge, and contesting truths within the confines of the cultural space of a hospice.

The Common Point of Countries Successful Policies in the Struggle Against COVID-19: Women Leaders.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, which is one of the biggest epidemics of the last century and can be regarded as a global tragedy, leaders had to mobilize many resources of their countries quickly and persuade their citizens to change their routine behavior. The approach followed by the leaders of the country in their efforts to convince their people has been an important factor in their success or failure. This paper aims to examine with Michel Foucault's notion of biopower, and discourses and behaviors of women leaders in countries against the global pandemic which cost high life tool gave harsh messages to the humanity. For this purpose, leadership examples in Finland, Iceland, Taiwan and New Zealand will be examined in detail using the discourse analysis technique. As a result, in current times when populist and autocratic leader style is on the rise, women leaders not only took their countries to success, but they also managed to inspire other countries. More importantly, the struggle of women leaders against the pandemic revealed that a different management style is possible.

Business, power, and private regulatory governance: Shaping subjectivities and limiting possibilities in the gold supply chain

AbstractTo examine how private regulatory governance reproduces a market logic that always already circumscribes possibilities for radical change, we tarry with Michel Foucault's notion of governmentality and his writings on power. We focus on two major initiatives created to regulate gold supply chains, subjecting their publicly released documents to a discourse analysis. This reveals subtle but tangible examples of how these initiatives discursively shape business preferences and possibilities for engaging with a social change agenda. Through a focus on how power circulating through these initiatives works to shape the identities and interests of business actors themselves, we contribute a new perspective to the literature on business, power, and private regulatory governance, one that highlights the ways through which these discourses both expand and limit business actors' engagement in setting social agendas and the mixed and sometimes seemingly contradictory implications for the public interest.

Patient-oriented research and the shiny object syndrome.

Patient-oriented research and the shiny object syndrome.

When the war is over: Accounting for people with disabilities

We assess the extent to which accounting discourse was used during the aftermath of the Second World War as a way of reconceptualising the notion of a person with disabilities from welfare recipient to income earner. Drawing on Foucault's notion of pastoral power, we interpret archival documents from this important period in the development of disability policy in Australia, which is so far unexplored in the accounting literature. We reveal the role of accounting in rationalising and operationalising government initiatives and programs assembled to address the ‘problem of disability’. We show that accounting terminology and techniques were mobilised as a way of justifying the transference of people with disabilities into sheltered workshops, a process that aimed to transform them into income earners who could contribute to the national economy.

‘I do enjoy the work, but I think the wages in the jails are shocking’: Analysing prisoner wages as a pain of imprisonment using Foucault's artifice

Until now, wages in prison and the meanings associated with them have been relatively overlooked within penology. This study analyses findings from a research project conducted between 2019 and 2021 that explores multiple meanings attached to prisoner wages. Through the analysis of 29 semi-structured interviews were conducted with a cohort of purposely selected people in custody across three prisons in Scotland, this study provides unique and rich insights into prison wages. Themes analysed include comments relating to wage rates and what emerges as a particularly tenuous link between wages within and outside prison. Receiving a weekly wage close to the hourly UK minimum wage was seen as an integral part of the life in prison and compounded feelings of detachment to life outside of prison. Our findings also indicate that sentiments associated with prison wages are significantly shaped by pre-prison experience of wages. The impact of imprisonment in relation to prison wages are stratified by income, given the differences in experience related to pre-prison employment and wage levels. Our paper also situates prison wages within a wider context through engaging with Foucault's notion of ‘artifice’ which served to develop an understanding of the logic behind the low levels of remuneration for prison work. Our study has relevance in all prison jurisdictions where people in custody receive wages significantly less than local minimum wage legislation or sectoral tariffs would normally dictate.

The Violence of the System: Production of Disposable Subjects

The objective of this paper is to reflect on new and increasingly subtle forms of aggression against marginalized groups. In particular, it addresses the case of immigrants who are constantly subjected to state, police, and citizen surveillance and control. The article is organized into three sections corresponding to the main and sub-themes. The first section addresses the Foucaultian notion of State Racism defined as the condition for the sovereign exercise of power to be legitimately articulated in a society. The second section refers to the critical debate proposed by the French academic Didier Bigo on the securitization of migration, understood as the one that justifies coercive and discriminatory practices towards those who cross borders. Finally, based on the proposal of the philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard, the last section of the article concludes with an analysis on the violence of the current system dominated by an exclusionary productive order in which personal interest reigns and where life and the link with the other are commodified producing “disposable”

Principles-based risk regulatory reforms and management control practices: a field study

PurposeGovernment reforms have seen shifts from rules-based to principles-based risk regulatory governance. This paper examines the effects of principles-based risk regulatory reforms on public sector risk management (RM) and management control practices in public sector organizations (PSOs).Design/methodology/approachThe principles-based regulation focuses on providing autonomy to PSOs while maintaining control over their actions without direct intervention. This resonates with Foucault's notion of how modern forms of governments operate. The research is informed by Foucault's concept of governmentality. The authors conducted a qualitative field study of an Australian PSO, gathering and analysing data from interviews, focus groups, and archival documents.FindingsThe findings show the capillary modes by which principles-based risk regulatory regime penetrates and works with management control practices in pursuit of regulatory goals within the PSO the authors studied. In addition, the authors find that the principles-based approach (focusing on autonomy) and rules-based approach (focusing on control) are not opposites in kind and effect but rather, autonomy should be understood as a central pillar of control. Furthermore, the findings show how cultural controls and formal controls are not in conflict but are interconnected in RM practices, with cultural controls providing control architecture for RM and formal control translating the control architecture into routines. Finally, the study provides insights into how enterprise risk management (ERM) provides capabilities for and routinizes RM practices in a PSO and the management control systems (MCS) that enabled this to occur.Originality/valueThe paper provides novel insights into how MCS are infiltrated, mobilized and deployed to enact principles-based risk regulatory reforms. These insights are useful for regulators, practitioners and researchers.

Being of Use: Diffraction and an Ethics of Truth-Telling in Post-Cartesian IR

Abstract This paper presents an ethics premised on a post-Cartesian ontology: that what we know is how we know and vice versa. The acknowledgment of the international relations (IR) scholar's constitutive relation to the world she seeks to describe, and of which she is a part, entails an ethics that is also a practice and an agency. I build on Karen Barad's quantum theory and on Michel Foucault's notion of parrhesia to address two problems in IR theory, namely that reflexivity and the pragmatist call for praxis pay insufficient attention to how power conditions knowledge production. Barad offers an “ethico-onto-epistemology” as a nonrepresentationalist methodology, which attends to the material difference knowledge can make rather than the accuracy of our representations. Parrhesia, in turn, problematizes our relationship with the activity of knowing itself. In the pragmatist sense, we are asked not only to be of use to our communities, but also to be mindful of who we are and what kind of subject we become in our phenomenal inscriptions of reality. This quantum ethic allows us to better realize the pragmatist ideal of a democratic social science by allowing us to resist the centripetal force of epistemic sovereignty and the cooptation of scientific authority.