ABSTRACT
In this chapter, “Docile Bodies” in Discipline and Punish, Foucault highlights three features of what he calls disciplinary power: The scale of the control; the object of the control; the modality of the control. In disciplinary power the body is treated individually and in a coercive way because the body itself is the active and hence apparently free body that is being controlled through movements, gestures, attitudes, and degrees of rapidity. Which involves meticulous control over the efficiency of movements and forces; which involves constant, uninterrupted coercion; Natural destiny is being supplanted by technologically grounded coercion, and the coercion is camouflaged by the language of choice, fulfillment, and liberation. The Voices are seductive— they speak the language of gaining access to transcendence, achievement, liberation, and power. In electing to undergo cosmetic surgery, women appear to be protesting against the constraints of the “given” in their embodied lives and seeking liberation from those constraints.
