1998 - Pylypa Foucault Antropologia Cuerpo OCR
1998 - Pylypa Foucault Antropologia Cuerpo OCR
1998 - Pylypa Foucault Antropologia Cuerpo OCR
Jen Pylypa
FO U C A U L T ON B lO P O W E R
For example, in The Birth o f the Clinic, Foucault describes how the
medical profession gained prestige by employing "scientific" knowledge,
which gave it considerable power in defining reality (Foucault 1975).
Medicine, through such means as the creation of disease categories,
acquired the power to define the "normal" and identify the "deviant".
The medical profession thus had the authority to create statistical
measures—norms against which all individuals could be judged. Through
the process of normalization, power is both "totalizing", because it
24 ARIZONA ANTHROPOLOGIST
Power thus operates through both the production of knowledge, and the
creation of a desire to conform to the norms that this knowledge
establishes. This desire to conform leads people to sustain their own
oppression voluntarily, through self-disciplining and self-surveillance.
Self-monitoring is achieved on two interacting levels: practice and
discourse. Individuals feel compelled to regulate their bodies to conform
to norms, but also to talk about what they "should" and "should not" do
and to "confess" any deviation from these norms.
Power is strongest when it is able to mask itself: "Its success is
proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms" (Foucault
1980a:86). The manipulation of desire is one mechanism by which
power masks itself—by making that which is constraining appear positive
and desirable. Power can also be disguised as resistance. For example,
Foucault sees the repressive hypothesis as a deception. While seemingly
opposing power by pointing to its coercive and repressive nature, it
draws attention away from the more subtle mechanisms of power on the
"micro-levels" of everyday life. When power meets with resistance, it is
not overcome; it simply finds new ways of manifesting itself: "...power
can retreat here, re-organize its forces, invest itself elsewhere...and so the
battle continues" (Foucault 1980b:56). There is a constant interaction of
power and resistance in which power asserts itself, meets with resistance,
and responds by re-asserting itself in a new guise.
F a t a n d F it n e s s
we must "know when to say when" (Nichter and Nichter 1991): eat, but
know when to stop; go out for a drink, but come home sober and get
some sleep so that you will be a productive worker in the morning.
The fitness movement reinforces a belief in individual control over
the body and responsibility for health, an ideology which also serves the
needs of the capitalist state. The belief in individual responsibility for
health reinforces the "American Dream ideology"—the capitalist ideal of
equal opportunity and the value of hard work (Nichter and Nichter 1991).
Everyone can be in good shape and thin, if they just try hard enough.
Crawford (1977) discusses how the ideology of individual responsibility
also leads people to expect to be in charge of their own health, in contrast
to the idea of a "right" to health care that has become increasingly
accepted. This justifies restrictions on rights to medical services, saving
the government and businesses money on health care costs. It may also
create a voluntary reduction in help-seeking, and justifies the shifting of
health care costs back to the consumer. Finally, it diverts attention away
from the social and environmental causes of illness—poverty,
carcinogens in the work place, air pollution, diminished ozone—that
would be more costly to treat.
F e m in in it y
For women, the desire for thinness and fitness is reinforced by their
association with an ideal of femininity. An extended example from the
work of Bordo (1989) reveals how powerful and destructive self
disciplinary practices can be, and their capacity to create "docile bodies".
Bordo discusses three examples of femininity taken to an extreme—the
disorders of hysteria, agoraphobia, and anorexia. These disorders
represent an exaggeration of the norms of femininity of the historical
period in which each emerged, and especially in the case of anorexia, an
extreme self-disciplining in an effort to conform to these norms.
Hysteria is a magnified embodiment of the nineteenth century ideals of
the feminine as "delicacy and dreaminess, sexual passivity, and a
charmingly labile and capricious emotionality" (Bordo 1989:16). This
image was formalized by scientific literature which described normal
femininity as such. Agoraphobia embodies the feminine ideal of
domesticity and dependency prominent in the 1950s and 1960s. In the
late twentieth century, anorexia has emerged in the context of a health
movement which has idealized thinness, and the media and advertising
industry which have taken the ideal of thinness for women to an extreme.
A closer look at the example of anorexia clearly illustrates several
of Foucault's key points: power operates through self-disciplining, self
surveillance, and the production of desire, constructing an illusory
Pylypa: Power and Bodily Practice 29
Furthermore, she argues that the criteria for the feminine body—frailty,
minimal eating, reduced mobility, and so forth-create a body design that
is unfit for activities outside of this limited female realm. The creation of
femininity and its opposition to masculinity reinforces the division of
social and economic life into separate male and female, dominant and
subordinate roles. Applying Foucault's model of the interplay of power
and resistance, it could be argued that at a time when women are
resisting by actively challenging male authority, power is reasserting
30 ARIZONA ANTHROPOLOGIST
itself through the ideals of femininity that render women docile, or in the
case of anorexia, even incapacitated.
activities is the norm for the birth process, and any objection or departure
from these norms, however unnecessary the procedures may be, is
considered deviant and unacceptable. For example, Cesareans have been
forced by court order on women on the basis of medical advice, without
taking the mother's opinion or embodied knowledge into account. In the
majority of cases, forced c-sections have later been shown to have been
unnecessary (e.g. Jordan and Irwin 1992).
The discourse of risk reinforces the standardized use of these
obstetrical procedures. Birth has been defined as inherently risky, to be
managed by the risk-reducing application of technology and scientific
knowledge. Every birth is treated as high risk, resulting in a "maximum
strategy" which focuses on the worst case scenario (Michaelson 1988).
The belief in the inherently risky nature of birth combined with the threat
of malpractice has resulted in tighter control over the birth process. As
one Texas obstetrician stated:
Certainly I've changed the way I practice since malpractice became an issue. I
do more c-sections, that's the major thing. And more and more tests to cover
myself. More expensive stuff. We don't do risky things that women ask
for....(cited in Davis-Floyd 1990:177)
The ability to make decisions is thus taken away from the mother and
placed in the hands of the medical profession and its technology. As the
above citation demonstrates, the transferring of control to the medical
establishment is the product of both a medical discourse and a legal one.
The concern with minimizing risk is a legal as well as medical issue,
since the failure to avoid all possible risk carries the legal penalty of a
possible malpractice suit. Thus, practices such as the excessive use of
medical technology result from the production of various distinct types
of knowledge—that is, they are the product of multiple, interacting
discourses.
Through the language of risk, obstetrical procedures become norms,
and variation from them is seen as dangerous and unethical. Like the
discourse on fitness, this is a moral discourse. Obstetrical procedures are
equated with safety, and deviations from them are equated with unethical
risk-taking. As one of Davis-Floyd's physician-informants reported:
My philosophy is...keeping in mind safety above all else, and not
compromising safety for social reasons. If women put demands on me where I
can't monitor the baby, or have an IV in them when they suddenly abrupt and
go into shock, start haemorrhaging and go into shock before I can get an IV in -
no, I can't live with that....There are guys out there that will do anything they
ask, who make birth a social event. And I think they jeopardize the woman's
safety and the baby's safety (cited in Davis-Floyd 1990:184).
32 ARIZONA ANTHROPOLOGIST
F r e e W il l a n d S o c ia l C h a n g e ?
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