The feminist charge that Michel Foucault's work in general and his history of sexuality in particular are masculinist, sexist, and reflect male biases vexes feminist philosophers of disability who believe his claims about (for instance) the constitution of subjects, genealogy, governmentality, discipline, and regimes of truths imbue their feminist analyses of disability and ableism with complexity and richness, as well as inspire theoretical sophistication and intellectual rigor in the fields of philosophy of disability and disability studies more generally. No aspect (...) of Foucault's corpus has been more consistently subjected to the charges of masculinism and male bias than his example of the nineteenth-century farmhand Charles Jouy who, at about forty years of age, engaged in sexual activity with a girl, Sophie Adam, was reported to authorities, and subsequently was incarcerated in Maréville for the rest of his days. My central aim in this paper is to interrupt the momentum of the accepted feminist interpretation of the Jouy case by advancing a feminist perspective on Jouy's identity and the incidents involving Jouy and Adam that takes seriously insights derived from philosophy of disability and critical disability theory and history. (shrink)

In psychiatry, the concept of “insight” commonly refers to a patient’s judgment that they have a mental illness and need clinical treatment. However, this concept has been criticized because it imposes psychiatric knowledge on the subjective experiences of mental illness and possible interventions. A significant body of literature is critical of mental health interventions; however, insight remains under-explored in this realm. This paper adds to critical analyses of insight by exploring how it is defined and deployed by mental health professionals (...) in an acute inpatient mental health unit in a Canadian general hospital and what disciplinary and epistemic effects it has on patients. To this end, I draw on Foucault’s theories of psychiatric power and Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice to analyze results from an ethnographic study conducted in an inpatient mental health unit. The results show how patients’ resistance to medical compliance is framed by staff as a lack of insight, which reinforces the psychiatric model of mental illness. (shrink)

This essay critically analyzes a common metaphor in political theory, which figures the growth of power as a process of “spreading” or “diffusion.” It argues that narratives that cast the generalization of power as a movement of “spreading” often fail to furnish the specific type of historical evidence that they imply, such that these narratives are frequently received as richly suggestive yet ultimately unjustified. This essay develops an alternative way of conceptualizing the generalization of power, one that rests on rigorous (...) yet speculative evidence of the sort that political theorists are best positioned to find: not proof of literal extension or application of existing powers to new domains, but accidental convergences, isomorphisms, and ideal combinations among disparate practices that introduce large powers into the world. To do this, the essay revisits Foucault’s narrative of the generalization of disciplinary power in modern Western societies, which is perhaps the clearest source for the familiarity of the figure of “spread” in contemporary political theory. It shows that Foucault’s incessant use of the “spread” metaphor naturally invites the dismissive reading that Discipline and Punish received in many quarters, for it implies a historical process that Foucault cannot justify. Yet I argue that in a brief self-criticism, Foucault provides the rudiments for a conception of power’s generalization far more useful and compelling than the metaphoric of “spread.” I suggest that this alternative, if developed, is not just the proper frame for interpreting Foucault’s narrative, but a promising practical resource for contemporary theorists of general powers. (shrink)

Although Foucault’s 1979 lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics promised to treat the theme of biopolitics, the course deals at length with neoliberalism while mentioning biopolitics hardly at all. Some scholars account for this elision by claiming that Foucault sympathized with neoliberalism; I argue on the contrary that Foucault develops a penetrating critique of the neoliberal claim to preserve individual liberty. Following Foucault, I show that the Chicago economist Gary Becker exemplifies what Foucault describes elsewhere as biopolitics: a form of (...) power applied to the behavior of a population through the normalizing use of statistics. Although Becker’s preference for indirect intervention might seem to preserve the independence of individuals, under biopolitics individual liberty is itself the means by which populations are governed indirectly. In my view, by describing the history and ambivalence of neoliberal biopolitics, Foucault fosters a critical vigilance that is the precondition for creative political resistance. (shrink)

Conservation biology is a branch of ecology devoted to conserving biodiversity. Because this discipline is based on the assumption that knowledge should guide actions, it endows experts with a power that should be questioned. The work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault can be seen as a relevant conceptual resource to think these aspects of conservation biology through. I critically analyse the relevance of the Foucauldian approach to conservation. I argue that Foucauldian arguments are deeply ambiguous, and therefore useless for (...) conservation purposes, unless they are supplemented with unsaid assumptions that are, depending on the case at hand, untenable, or at least at odds with basic assumptions underlying conservation biology. In any case, the prospects of using the Foucauldian approach for conservation purposes are deeply undermined. However, the Foucauldian reasoning contains some ideas that can be important and useful for conservation purposes, if they are duly clarified. (shrink)