User:Mkozlow18/sandbox

For Michel Foucault power relies on the ignorance of its agents. The discovery and emergence of biopower, and biopolitics, a biological and political technology of its population, highlights this fact. No single human, group or actor runs the dispositif (machine or apparatus), but power is dispersed through the apparatus as efficiently and silently as possible, ensuring its agents do whatever is necessary. It is because of this action that power is unlikely to be detected, so remains elusive to 'rational' investigation according to Foucault. Foucault quotes a text reputedly written by political economist Jean Baptiste Antoine Auget de Montyon, entitled Recherches et considérations sur la population de la France (1778), but in fact written by his secretary Jean-Baptise Moheau (1745–1794) and by emphasizing Biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck who constantly refers to Milieus as a plural adjective and sees into the milieu as an expression as nothing more than water air and light confirming the genus within the milieu, in this case the human species, relates to a function of the population and its social and political interaction in which both form an artificial and natural milieu. This milieu (both artificial and natural) appears as a target of intervention for power according to Foucault which is radically different from the previous notions on sovereignty, territory and disciplinary space inter woven from a social and political relations which function as a species (biological species).

Foucault originated and developed the concept of "docile bodies" in his book Discipline and Punish. He writes, "A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved. "Foucault claims that there is a shift, during the 18th century, in which political power changed. Instead of using corporeal punishment in order to convince people to adhere to the laws of the day, Foucault says power becomes internalized during this period. Instead of watching someone be drawn and quartered in a public space, political power is exerted on individuals in a way that compels them to obey laws and rules on their own - without this show of force. He builds on the ideas of Jeremy Bentham regarding the Panopticon in which prison inmates are compelled to behave and control themselves because they might be in the view of the prison guard. The physical shape of the Panopticon creates a situation in which the prison guard need not be present for this to happen, because the mere possibility of the presence of the guard compels the prisoners to behave. Foucault takes this theory and makes it generalizable to everyday life. He claims that this kind of surveillance is constant in modern society, and the populous at large enacts it. Therefore, everyone begins to control themselves and behave according to society's rules and norms.

Feminist philosophers took up Foucault's ideas regarding docile bodies and applied them to the different ways men and women are socialized to use their bodies. For one example, philosopher Sandra Bartky says in her essay, ""Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power" that “The disciplinary techniques through which the ‘docile bodies’ of women are constructed aim at a regulation that is perpetual and exhaustive - a regulation of the body’s size and contours, its appetite, posture, gestures and general comportment in space, and the appearance of each of its visible parts. " Bartky theorizes that there is a specific and relentless pressure on women when it comes to bodily movements and comportment; this "docility" manifests as women make themselves smaller, groom themselves in ways that make them appear more feminine, and control their bodily movements in order to be as minimally obtrusive as possible. She also cites diet, exercise, and skin care, among other processes, as sites in which the feminine body is made docile.