Docile Bodies:

Your Topics:

1. Modification through Cosmetic Surgery

2. Commercialized versions of the body

3. Technologies of Modification of Body Parts

Consumers, consumerism & commodification:Your Topics:

1. Students as Consumers of Knowledge 2. Commodification of education 3. Women students disciplined

Why study Media and Movies (popular culture)?• Cinema is a symbolic system:“mediating the

spectator and the world in countless exchangeable ways” (Morrison ,1990: 150).

• A mediation between the real world and the spectator who watch and gaze. Watching films of Hollywood - an effective tool in conditioning the characters.

• Cinema conditions visual life – it empowers perception - language conspires with perception of images

Hollywood as a cinematic apparatus:Disseminate the “Normal”e.g.: Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye - cinema is a machine that targets the minds and the psyches of her female characters – a society that daily practices the modelling of individuals through the institutions of : Family Educational institutions Mass mediaIndividuals desire :• to represent images of the flawless body• to climb the ladder of beauty

"Each night Pecola prayed forblue eyes.In her eleven years, no one had ever noticed Pecola. But with blueeyes, she thought, everythingwould be different. She would beso pretty that her parents wouldstop fighting. Her fatherwould stop drinking. Her brotherwould stop running away. Ifonly she could be beautiful.If only people would look at her."

(Back Cover)

Consumers, consumerism & commodification:

1. Students as Consumers of Knowledge 2. Commodification of education3. Women students disciplined

How do Consumers become captured body as they are lured into

surveillance machines?1. Participants in their own capture - participate in bodies being

watched - exchange databody for product 2. Click-and-buy has an intermediary step - it is indicated that a

certain information is to be collected about you. 3. In-between step: the participant may say, “whatever” and may feel

a sense of docility or futility4. To participate in consumer society, one has to be watched – Is

resistance futile? It’s more that you wouldn’t if you could: “Whatever.”

5. Surveillance has allowed the docile to consume not product but space, e.g.: in airports, on the way to your remote comfort lounge

6. Password society has overtaken the Panoptic7. Surveillance captures bodies8. Grants physical access to the body as Databodies

• Databodies wait at customs at Airports• Bodies arch their necks for the eye-scanner (Deleuze)

• Consumer is Aware and Profiled • If the body wishes to becoming a unique individual and

behave less like a shopper/consumer - “I want to be me, not them,” looking at the profiling machine showing his transparent image for the profiler at the back of the machine

• “ I want to escape from this rendering of myself? How can I recompile my dataself?” 1. the self is taken over by data capture, storage,

algorithm, and recommendation2. If the consumer tries to reassert himself through

interactions with his TV and digital video recorder - TiVo.

Confessions and Control

Content and Influences of Reality TV

Representations of Youth/Women/Men

Reality TVJudge Joe Brown, and Divorce Court The People’s Court, Judge Mathis, and Judge Hatchett.

Disciplinary Measures: Reinscribing Morality

1. Power2. Surveillance3. Spectacle4. Docile Bodies

Mediating Morality: Discursive Implications

Documentary & News: Youth, Mom, Parenting, Child models1.What are the productive effects of the power invested in the cinematic investigation of sex? 2.What techniques of power and the will to truth are implicated in the cinematic form of the interview?3.The body is specific – that of the filmed and of the filmmaker4.Where do film-makers stand and how do they represent their views and positioning? 5.To what extent should they question their right to represent the perceptions and concerns of others? 6.Do they represent their own knowledge as situated or omniscient? 7.What are the consequences of these choices? 8.How does profit intersect with pleasure in such an investigation? 9.What instruments are used to make a body docile - a sexual subject, body in confessional, into an electronic body?

Obese Body, Cosmetic body, Modified body and Ambiguous Body1. Symbolic role and rhetorical function of mediated representations of food or cosmetics.2.How films use food or cosmetics to engage bodies 3.How do films comfort bodies while individuals consciously become imprisoned bodies?4.How do films mediate anxieties that arise from ambiguous identities in contemporary culture, especially around beauty. gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity.

Plagiarism and student as docile consumer body :

1.What is the process of Self-surveillance by the student ?

• Education as governmentality as well as misguided efforts in education are regimes of self-examination and self-surveillance linked to a notion of power that operates from within the student, rather than from above or from outside.

• In the process of becoming a ‘student subject’ the student becomes a self-monitoring agent and peer-controlled through use of social media .

• The imperative of confession is used to situate the student within a particular nexus of power – confessions to peer, to others, and to the public.

Docile Bodies:

Electronic databodies

Consuming databodies

Cosmetic databodies

Techniques of discipline : Disciplining is the technology of power over the body:• Movie and Image representations: surveillance, normalization, objectification, control, disciplining • Narratives in print media: same as above• Facebook: Stealing or using personal profiles• Spyware , a panoptic tool intrusively extract user information for corporate and state authorities • Pop-ups as adware breaches privacy and invisibly intrudes to control totally• Carnivore, a sophisticated wiretapping/ eavesdropping program developed by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to allow FBI to spy on online/e-mail activities of suspected criminals which chews all the data on the network, although it eats only the information authorized by a court order

"The intelligible body includes…our cultural conceptions of the body, norms of beauty, models of health, and so forth. But the same representations may also be seen as forming a set of practical rules and regulations through which the living body is "trained, shaped, obeys, responds," becoming, in short, a socially adapted and "useful body."" (Bordo, 181)

Body is raw material to be molded and reshaped into something better and different.http://www.sacredgrounds-tattoo.com/image/2217652.jpeg "…cosmetic surgery, piercing, aerobics, and nautilus all point to a conception of the body as raw material to be fragmented into parts, molded, and reshaped into a more perfect form….The body has become, like Barbie, all surface, a ground for staging cultural identities." (Urla & Swedlund, 305)

Exercise is now commodified and broken down into repeatable steps and specific procedures. The fit body functions like a machine, hardened, strong, aligned and perfectly capable of completing difficult repetitious tasks, such as repeated weight lifting.

"Those are NOT Real": Plastic Surgery and Authenticity

http://students.washington.edu/gaspee/ accessed Feb 2010Normal and Productive Bodies Liz Gasperini

"Happiness in this instance exists in crossing the boundary separating one category from another. It is rooted in the necessary creation of arbitrary demarcations between the perceived reality of the self and the ideal category into which one desires to move." (Gilman, 22)

Is the body a machine?Is it becoming docile or does it release the inner self to be free?

http://www.impawards.com/1999/posters/boys_dont_cry_ver1.jpg

http://www.cartoonstock.com/

The negative idea of "the other" is an inherent part of the social norms of western culture.

http://annansi.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/amex_red_ad.jpg

http://radio.about.com/od/howardstern/ig/Howard-Stern-Photos/Howard-Stern-in-Drag.htm

"…We are surrounded by homogenizing and normalizing images-images whose content is far from arbitrary, but is instead suffused with the dominance of gendered, racial, class, and other cultural iconography." (Bordo, 250)

"...yet what determines the effect of realness is the ability to compel belief, to produce the naturalized effect. This effect is itself the result of an embodiment of norms, a reiteration of norms, and impersonation of a racial and class norm, a norm which is at once a figure, a figure of a body, which is no particular body, but a morphological ideal that remains the standard which regulates the performance, but which no performance fully approximates." (Butler 129)

"Through the pursuit of an ever-changing, homogenizing, elusive ideal of femininity-a pursuit without terminus…female bodies become docile bodies-bodies whose forces and energies are habituated to external regulation, subjection, transformation, "improvement."" (Bordo, 166)

"Dominant discourses of feminine fitness represent the female body as a consuming body, a body that is limited in its productivity because it cannot "work off" consumption easily. Eating is seen as a particularly enticing indulgence for women that must be controlled not only through exercise but also through dieting."(Gremillion, 55)

http://images.jupiterimages.com/common/detail/35/86/22778635.jpg

"The general tyranny of fashion-perpetual, elusive, and instructing the female body in a pedagogy of personal inadequacy and lack-is a powerful discipline for the normalization of all women in this culture." (Bordo, 254)

Women have been transformed into a commodity

http://www.calikartel.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/dolceandgabbana07.jpg

Source: April 2, 2012 Instructor: Sarah Whetstone (next 7 slides)

•“Discourse” – The categories of knowledge that form our consciousness. The scope of what is “knowable.” A way of seeing the world that implies the organization of power.

•Discourses are limiting as well as enabling– “Discourse can be both an instrument of power and

an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy”

•Examples– Mental illness and the birth of “the clinic”– Punishment and the birth of “the prison”– Sexuality

“The History of Sexuality”

• In the 18th and 19th centuries, sexuality became an object of scientific knowledge and social concern

• Repressive Hypothesis – Victorian-era controls sought to repress human sexuality and desire.

• Foucault argued against the “repressive hypothesis.”– Repression was actually an “incitement” to sex– More focus on sex, more discussion– Tightening of laws sexual perversion– Sex seen as secretive, suspicious obsession– Establishment of powerful categories of

normal/abnormal• Power is productive.

“The History of Sexuality”

• In the 18th and 19th centuries, sexuality became an object of scientific knowledge and social concern

• Repressive Hypothesis – Victorian-era controls sought to repress human sexuality and desire.

• Foucault argued against the “repressive hypothesis.”– Repression was actually an “incitement” to sex– More focus on sex, more discussion– Tightening of laws sexual perversion– Sex seen as secretive, suspicious obsession– Establishment of powerful categories of

normal/abnormal• Power is productive.

Foucault, History of Sexuality: “A singularly

confessing society”• Justice• Medicine, psychiatry• Education• Family relationships• Love relations

The Confessional Box

The Roman Catholic tradition of Confession:Typically the penitent begins the confession by saying, "Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It has been [time period] since my last confession." The penitent then must confess mortal sins in order to restore his/her connection to God's grace and not to merit Hell.

The Confession as Double Subjection

Subject

As person under the rule of authority

Subject (Subjectivity)

As person with a narrative, identity who testifies, brings

their own Actions, Thoughts, Desires, Experiences to light

“The Confession” in Therapy

* Psychiatrist – patient creates a power dynamic (subject of power)

* Discourse of normal-abnormal established (Subjectivity through discourse)

* Productive power

Characteristics of Power-as-Productive

• A new theory of power: Power is not restricted to political or economic elites, nor is it narrowly defined by repression.

• Power is productive, focused on the power to administer and regulate life, rather than bring death

• Not a fixed property held by certain groups• Decentralized, diffuse• Fluid and present in all interactions • Where power is exercised, resistance

develops.