ABSTRACT
This chapter explores material series of processes, power actively marks or brands bodies as social, inscribing them with the attributes of subjectivity. It focuses on male theorists, authors objectives remain feminist: to see what in their works may be of use for a feminist account of sexed bodies. Foucault is probably the most well-known theorist of the body today. His disparate works cluster around a thematics of carnality and its relations to subjectivity, around, that is, the intricate history of the link between pleasure/pain/sensation/knowledge and power. Primitive body-marking does not merely spread out a surface of sexual intensity across the subject’s body, creating orifices, hollows, plateaux, rims where previously there were smooth spaces and unbroken surfaces. It divides up, or maps, the body in regular ordered sequences carefully specified in ritual form.
