Jen Pylypa
Power and Bodily Practice
Michel Foucault coined the term biopower to refer to the ways in which
power manifests itself in the form of daily practices and routine through which
individuals engage in self-surveillance and self-discipline and thereby subjugate
themselves. This concept highlights how individuals are responsible for their
own oppression as they participate in self-regulation of hygiene, health and
sexuality
Jen Pylypa highlights how behaviours associated with physical fitness
femininity and obstetrical practices contribute to the creation of docile bodies.
Following Foucault, he argues that power is not imposed from above by a
dominant group but from below. We as individuals are all the vehicles of
power because it is embedded in discourses that are part of our practices,
habits and day-to-day interactions. Power operates through the production of
knowledge and the creation of a desire to confirm to the norms that this
knowledge. It operates through desire and leads people to self-oppression.
Fat and Fitness
The obsession with fit and healthy body has resulted in a health
discourse and media discourse. This discourse presents the fit and thin body as
healthy and treats the overweight or unfit body as unhealthy and deviant. The
media discourse is a product of Media and Advertising industry. This discourse
portrays the fit and thin body as not only healthy but also beautiful and sexy
and fat body as ugly and sexy and unpopular. Fitness is associated with
personal responsibility and unfitness is equalled to immorality. The ideology of
individual responsibility for health creates a belief in personal obligation to
maintain good health through dieting and physical fitness activities.
Fitness is believed to be an unmistakable sign of self-control, discipline,
and willpower. Health is equated with fitness and thinness and achieved
through adherence to disciplinary regimes of diet and exercise.
The surveillance of bodyweight and fitness comes from oneself others medical
professionals and media. It produces the type of body that the society requires
which is controlled, habituated to external regulation and self-restraint.
Femininity
For women the desire for thinness and fitness is reinforced by their association
with an ideal of femininity. Susan Bordo reveals that many of the disciplinary
practices of women create docile bodies. She illustrates it with the condition of
anorexia where women deliberately resist from taking food in order to stay
slim. The anorexic subjugates herself through extreme self-discipline and self-
denial and she sees it as liberating and as an expression of her own will.
Ironically, anorexia supports the patriarchal social structure by limiting
women's desires, needs, and ambitions. It also creates a body design that is
unfit for activities outside of this limited female realm. At a time when women
are resisting by actively challenging male authority, power is asserting itself
through the ideals of femininity that render women the docile.
Obstetrics
According to Foucault, the medical profession historically gained
considerable power to define reality through the control of privileged scientific
knowledge. Davies Floyd discusses the use of obstetrical rituals which are not
beneficial but are the product of medical knowledge created to make child
birth a controlled and monitored procedure rather than a natural process.
Many obstetrical procedures such as lithotomy positions, episiotomies and
overuse of Caesarean sections are unnecessary and harmful to women.
Through such unnecessary procedures birth is transformed from a natural
process into a medical event. Birth has been defined as inherently risky to be
managed by the risk reducing application of Technology and scientific
knowledge. The ability to make decisions is thus taken away from the mother
and placed in the hands of the medical profession and technology. The
obstetrical practices serve to create female bodies that are docile, enforcing
the patriarchal social order. It ignores women's embodied knowledge on child
birth and child rearing.
