ABSTRACT
In a striking critique of modern society, Michel Foucault has argued that the rise of parliamentary institutions and of new conceptions of political liberty was accompanied by a darker counter-movement, by emergence of a new and unprecedented discipline directed against the body. The production of “docile bodies” requires that an uninterrupted coercion be directed to the very processes of bodily activity, not just their result; this “micro-physics of power” fragments and partitions the body’s time, its space, and its movements. An aesthetic of femininity that mandates fragility and a lack of muscular strength produces female bodies that can offer little resistance to physical abuse, and the physical abuse of women by men, as we know, is widespread. The disciplinary power that is increasingly charged with the production of a properly embodied femininity is dispersed and anonymous; there are no individuals formally empowered to wield it; it is, as we have seen, invested in everyone and in no one in particular.
