What is the relationship between body and power? Does a body have power? Is the body an object of power? Or, is the body a subject to power? In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, Michel Foucault analyzes the body’s relationship to power in an interview with the editorial collective of Quel Corps in June 1975. In his eloquent responses to a series of questions, Foucault analyzes, problematizes, and emphasizes the importance of the human body in relation to his notion of power. Overarching this discussion of bodies is his concept of discourse. While a Foucauldian discourse is not meant to be focus of this post, a brief review of what a Foucauldian discourse is may be helpful.

           A Foucauldian discourse provides a way for understanding, creating meaning, and producing knowledge through language in a certain historical context. According to Hall (1997), a discourse has six key elements: (1) It creates statements that give us a certain kind of knowledge; (2) It has rules which prescribe certain ways of talking about topics and exclude other ways at a particular historical moment; (3) It creates subjects and creates relational power between subjects; (4) It is a project with totalizing desires; (5) It regulates and conducts bodies; and (6) It is historically situated and can be supplanted by different discourses to regulate social practices in new ways (45-46). A Foucauldian discourse, then, is both a way meaning is organized in order to make reality possible and sets of power. The idea of discourses being sets of power in relation to the body will be the focus of the remainder of this response paper.

           Returning to the questions posed at the beginning: What is the relationship between the body and power? Does a body have power? Is the body an object of power? Or, is the body a subject of power? In response to the first question, Foucault would maintain that such a seemingly simple question is actually deserving of a much more complicated answer. In order to properly answer that question, he would have to know what kind of body we were asking about, when and where that body was situated, and what other discourses were simultaneously acting upon the body in question. Moreover, even if he did have all of that information available, he would still likely argue that “As always with relations of power, one is faced with complex phenomena which don’t obey the Hegelian form of the dialectic” (1975:56). Nonetheless, throughout this interview, Foucault seems to argue that the body is both an object of power and a subject of power.

           Because discourses create subjects – bodies – they become subjected to the sets of power within the discourse. However, discourses also creates relational power between bodies; thus, bodies become objects of power. Foucault argues that the “Mastery and awareness of one’s own body can be acquired only though the effect of an investment of power in the body…by way of insistent, persistent, meticulous work of power on the bodies” (1975:56). Because discourses have totalizing desires – which can be both pleasurable and pervasive – Foucault is really arguing that the “highly intricate mosaic” (1975:62) of institutions in power have invested a significant amount of power within our individual bodies, so that we begin to become aware of our bodies in terms of maintaining the “normal” and “ideal” healthy body. Our bodies are insistently, persistently, and meticulously “educated” from the time we are children to adhere to and to resemble a “healthy” individual. The pervasive and arguably, pleasurable power of such a discourse becomes exemplified once our bodies become self-regulating – we begin to insistently, persistently, and meticulous watch, discipline, and regulate our bodies from becoming “unhealthy” or deviant bodies. This is the goal of the discourse: to produce docile bodies that exercise self-surveillance. The social body, according to Foucault, is the docile body (1975:55). He maintains, “the phenomenon of the social body is the effect not of a consensus but of the materiality of power operating on the very bodies of individuals” (1975:55). Essentially, what Foucault is arguing is that the social body/society – a collection of individual, docile bodies – is a material manifestation of the sets of power operating within the discourse. The social body/society is not constituted by the universality of individual wills, rather, the social body/society is constituted by multiple, dominant, and interconnected discourses that work together to produce specific types of docile bodies, as well as specific types of “deviant” bodies situated outside of the discourse. An ethnographic example of multiple, dominant, and interconnected discourses working together to create both “ideal” and “deviant” bodies is Sarah Horton and Judith Barker’s 2009 ethnographic study on oral health and undocumented immigrants in California.

           Foucault has argued, “One needs to study what kind of body the current society needs…” (1975:58). Horton and Barker’s (2009) ethnographic study on oral health and undocumented immigrants in California demonstrated that California “needs” bodies that adhere to a “sanitary contract” between the state and it’s citizens. They argue, “Hygiene remains a potent symbolic marker of racial difference, and public health has continued to justify the exclusion of certain groups” (Horton and Barker 2009:785). Further, they maintain, “personal hygiene perhaps bears an even greater symbolic load as a marker of capacity for self-governance” (Horton and Barker 2009:785). In their exploration of the way public health campaigns’ anxieties about Mexican immigrants mothers’ caregiving practices have served as a potent site for constructions of Mexicans’ “deservingness” of citizenship, they focus on the increased public health concern for Latino children’s oral hygiene. They document how Mexican immigrants mothers have continually tried to provide their children with the oral hygiene they need, but have encountered substantial obstacles in order to simply comply with the public health campaigns. Moreover, they document a “new era of public health – one concerned with encouraging individual self-governance and self-responsibility rather than with policing public health through coercive eugenic measures” (Horton and Barker 2009:788). This shifts the burden of responsibility from the state to the individual – an adoption of neoliberal philosophy – which consequently caused the mothers who were unable to access or afford the oral health care for their children, to feel as if they had failed. Similarly, it has led public health officials to view these “unsuccessful” mothers as “poor caregivers” and thus, the disciplinary action against these Latino children with poor oral hygiene becomes justified.

           Horton and Barker’s 2009 ethnographic study exemplifies how multiple discourses work together to create “ideal” and “deviant” bodies. The discourses of neoliberalism, public health, and citizenship all work together to form specific types of bodies – those that perpetuate the discourses (i.e. public health officials, Denti-Cal policy makers, nurses) and those that deviate from the discourses (i.e. undocumented immigrants like Mrs. Madrigal). While some “deviant” bodies continually tried to become to “ideal body”, they were unsuccessful. They were unsuccessful not because they had “poor caregiving practices”, as the discourses have led them to believe; instead, they were unsuccessful because the discourses were arguably constructed to have them “fail” and to experience the inherent structural violence within the overall ontology of Foucauldian discourse.

           Reading the words of Foucault in conjunction with the work by Horton and Barker have made me realize the truly dark perspective Foucault must have had on human nature during the time of his writing. With his concept of discourse producing docile and deviant bodies, alongside his statement of “One needs to study what kind of body the current society needs…” (1975:58), is he really arguing that society innately needs “deviant” bodies in order to perpetuate the ideologies and hegemonies that the everyday citizen otherwise takes for granted (i.e. getting an education to better the self, going to the doctor to ensure good health, exercising to maintain good health)? Is he arguing that society needs the “deviant” bodies to serve as a reminder of what will happen if the docile body transgresses? If all of the bodies created by the discourse share relational power between them, then perhaps Foucault is arguing that societies need an “ideal” and a “deviant”; the “ideal” serves as something for the “deviant” to work towards, whereas the “deviant” serves the “Ideal” as something not to transgress towards. However, if all of this is true, then Foucault’s concept of discourse severely limits individual agency and really tends to ignore social diversity in terms of thinking and action.

           He maintains that once docile bodies become more and more aware of their own bodies, as an effect of the power of the discourse. “But, once power produces this effect there inevitably emerge the responding claims and affirmations, those of one’s own body against power” (Foucault 1975:56). The same body that was both an object and subject of power, “inevitably” begins to question that power as “Suddenly, what had made power strong becomes used to attack it. Power, after investing itself in the body, finds itself exposed to a counterattack in that same body” (Foucault 1975:56). How is this subversion of power in the body “inevitable”? What does that mean? How does it happen? Is it instantaneous or does this “inevitable” change happen over long periods of time? Does it only happen in docile bodies? What about those “deviant” bodies, who blamed the system all along – was the subversion of power in their bodies also “inevitable”? In terms of the relationship between the body and power in relation to discourse, Foucault has cemented his position that the body is both a subject and object of power; however, in terms of how that relationship develops in different discourses at different times, his argument seems to soften. Further, if he is arguing that discourses change through “inevitable” subversions of power in individual bodies, then it seems to me that his “battle should have continued” (Foucault 1975:56).