GSFS 200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Consumerism, Michel Foucault, Class Conflict

• School: McGill University
• Department: Gender, Sexuality, Feminist, and Social Justice Studies
• Course: GSFS 200
• Professor: Mary Bunch

Document Summary

What is discourse? (e. g. wilchins: the gender binary) Shifting structure of power: repressive power: power as something held by the state and exercised from the top down upon the individual. It is solid, concrete, and visible: you can see its operation by watching the police, the army, or the courts. This is repressive power: the power to silence, wound, and punish. Where gender is concerned, the main exercise of power is not through repression but production. Discursive power produces specific kinds of individuals, with specific bodies, pleasures and sexes: e. g. consumerism, gender norms, patriarchy, the beauty myth. In the discourse of gender, you can only say meaningful things about two kinds of bodies that will make sense: the idea of normal and abnormal is institutionalized in society. Schools, prisons, hospitals: foucault associates disciplinary power with institutions: the production of docile bodies requires that an uninterrupted coercion by directed to the very processes of bodily activity.