Michael Foucault, a French social theorist, believed that power and knowledge are used as a form of control in social institutions. In his book entitled "Discipline and Punish : The Birth of the Prison," he describes how every level of the prison,...

That level of destructive power and coercion that sovereign mechanisms can bring to bear is awe-inspiring is indisputable, and fixation on and discomfort with this fact permeates the work of both Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. Each of these...

In "Two Lectures," Michel Foucault criticizes historical materialism for inadequately explaining social phenomena. He derides academics that use bourgeois domination to explain a diverse range of social trends, including the exclusion of madness...

In her article “The Taming of Michel Foucault: New Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and the Subversion of Power,” Suzanne Gearhart describes what she calls “Foucault’s critical ‘dialogue’ with Freud,” specifically in his “analysis of the relation...

In Michel Foucault’s Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, the author revels in tales of past penal methods involving brutal torture of the convicted criminal as a popular public spectacle. He subtly denounces the rigid yet humane...

It is easy to look at Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, widely considered the first revenge tragedy play, as having a completely nonsensical ending. While the proceeding three acts are fairly typical for a revenge narrative, with machinations...

Foucault’s Discipline and Punish reads partly like a historic text and partly like a speculative essay. Its themes revolving around power, knowledge, and authority however, conveys fundamental principles that is innate to human nature. Foucault...

As a type of power that is vital to the function of institutions, discipline works to control the thoughts and actions of individuals to fulfill a specific agenda, such as preserving public safety or maximizing profits. Although numerous...

It is a cynical statement, but it is frighteningly valid: contemporary liberal societies are little more than disciplinary dystopias. Many different phenomena reveal this, especially when understood through the framework of Michel Foucault’s...

Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 production Tea and Sympathy evaluates the intricacies of accepted gender normativity in 1950’s America, providing a groundwork for understanding how human behavior is classified based on sex. The film further examines the...

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, humanity was beginning to discover and explore the connections and differences between the mind and the body, the body and the soul, the body and the surrounding world. It was during this period...

The trope of madness and the figure of the madman are notions that have for centuries fascinated, horrified, and perplexed Western culture. Considerations of madness have influenced myriad literary narratives, starting with the madness of...

Throughout “The Prose of the World,” Michel Foucault establishes himself as a conceptual archaeologist, one who seeks to uncover the history and theories behind what he calls “the human sciences.” It is a method in which Foucault reexamines...