Minutes for 24 March 2014

Brielle Scully

24 March 2014

Reading:  Sandra Bartky, “Foucault, Feminism, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power” (1990)        

I.               Business

II.             Bartky: Gendering Disciplinary Power

n  Filled out anonymous Midterm Check-In

n  Spoke briefly about how class might not understand some of the dated references in the article (i.e. jazzercise) but how the main point is still relevant today

Description:

~Foucault’s account of disciplinary power is sexist/ignores gender differences (ignoring what docile bodies of women v. docile bodies of men looks like)

~Women’s embodiments of femininity à Women’s subordination while “men get off Scott free” (contributes to women’s subordination because of the way disciplinary power works)

Analysis:

~Disciplinary power (focus on getting people to discipline themselves):

            = gendered

            = asymmetrically

n  Examples of panopticon (sense of being perpetually observed) in everyday life:

I.               Being on Emory internet network

II.             Emory email

III.           Applying Make-up

~Gendered “docile bodies” (lead to gendered subjectivities)

I.               Practices à body of a certain size and configuration (i.e. exercise regimes, dieting, plastic surgery)

II.             Practices that create a specific repertoire of gestures, postures (i.e. walking in heels, men sitting with their legs apart, tumblr: men taking up too much space on a subway, ANTM telling the models how to walk/pose, business school women’s and men’s formal attire)

III.           Displays of body as ornamental surface (i.e. jewelry, hair, make- up, perfume)

~Who is this happening to?

Not just worried that everyone is becoming docile bodies but is worried about the differences amongst (differences that show that women are flawed and imperfect; taught to be less powerful than it could be)

~Who is doing this? (Who are the disciplinarians?)

n  Coming from both everywhere and nowhere (she finds this worrying because it makes it harder to even realize that it is happening ALSO it makes it hard to hold anyone accountable AND makes it seem voluntary)

n  When you are young you have particular figures telling you how to act (brush your hair before leaving the house etc.)

n  Over time the policing comes from yourself or from anonymous sources (i.e. at the gas station in a skirt and someone says to you “girl, you need some color on your legs,” magazines, friends)

n   

~Some women are against feminism because they believe that it threatens women with deskilling

~Refusal of male patronage:

n  Less likely to get hired

n  People will not treat you as well

n  Act as though you must not care about yourself

Vision:

~Deconstruction of this structure of femininity and the masculinity that goes along with it (p. 81-82 “In the current political climate there is no need to… identified earlier in this essay”)

Strategies:

~Experimentation with new “styles of the flesh”

~Various forms of resistance to resist these disciplinary practices

Critiques & Questions:

~New norms (?)

~Class (undoes some of these other qualifications but can also work to enable it)

~Race

~Intersectionality

Class Discussion (excluded names just incase I butchered anyone’s arguments):

n  Sparks: So what is queer?

n  Student 1: There are a lot of bodies walking around and there are lots of variations… people walking down the street are complex

n  Student 2: worry that Student 1 is ignoring certain scripts that are associated with certain bodies

n  Student 1: Embodiment is already getting out of this dialectic

n  Student 3: Are you saying that in these theories bodies are so gendered but in real life there is a lot more fluidity?

n  Student 1: Exactly, masculinity and femininity aren’t mutually exclusive, and these binaries aren’t necessarily either. The way humans combine all of these within their own bodies is much more diverse than what we currently like to perceive.

n  Student 4: I agree that when you look around people are diverse. I guess I just don’t see the existence of these muddied representations

n  Student 1: The actual practice cognitively isn’t necessarily subversive but I think might what be subversive in a place like this is acknowledging the variance/spectrum.

n  Student 5: It goes back to the own self-discipline of although I am not acknowledging this system I am still striving to be masculine or striving to be feminine. It is all about intention. If it is your intention to embody yourself in a queer way then that is where the resistance comes in.

n  Student 6: It is the inherent variance in our bodies that makes us want to police them and make them uniform. If that did not exist then the policing would not exist.