ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault, the late French philosopher, in a series of works exploring the history of madness, illness, crime, and sexuality, attempted to excavate the genealogy of various modern scientific disciplines. Through a critical analysis of their assumptions, discourses, and actions, Foucault brought a historical indictment against such disciplines as medicine, pedagogy, criminology, psychiatry, and demography. He showed that the prevalent Western definitions of rationality, perversion, appropriate codes of sexual behavior, and delinquency were all formulated through the subjugation of an “other”: i.e. the “madman,” the “deviant,” the “born criminal,” the “delinquent” or the “hermaphrodite.”1 This “other” is “always pushed aside, marginalized, forcibly homogenized and devalued as that cognitive machinery does its work.”2
