Michel Foucault Essay Examples

According to Foucault, discourse is the process where we define, generate certain ideas about anything around us and makes sense of the reality through verbal communication such as writing or discussing with others. It sets the borderline for members of the community to think or...

Sex and sexual orientation are constantly questionable, they are never straightforward. Although it is not easy to understand, queer theorists want people to comprehend the idea of: What you believe you understand about sexual orientation, if it’s being gay, straight, etc. it can be undermined....

Health geography presents the interaction between people and the environment. Institutions are formal bodies/groups which have set habits, rules, and values that structure people’s actions (Mackinnon, 2009). Geography institutions are the interaction of people and place in a modern disciplinary society. Foucault believed that this...

The concept of docile bodies is introduced by Michel Foucault as individuals who can be subjected, used, transformed and improved. Disciplinary power plays an important role in this as it shapes society in the form of education, military, hospitals, etc. Through these institutions, which combine...

In modern society, the dominant social account of ‘madness’, the attached characteristics, meanings and treatment is monopolised by psychiatry and medicine, reducing the basis for its existence simply to biological differences. Historically, individuals were provided with socially produced images and descriptions of specific characteristics of...

To exercise its ideology, a totalitarian government needs to utilize different fields of sciences and arts. Architecture is one field that is able to serve the aims of the government. The British utilitarian philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) offers an example of an...

Power, at its essence, is about establishing fear and dominance. During the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery, when the Church was in power and control of the state, in order to preserve that control, they had to spread fear among the citizens. If they...

In Michel Foucault’s essay, Panopticism from ‘Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison,’ he introduces Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, a circular building with a tower in the center that enabled guards to have a perfect viewpoint of each prisoner in their cell. For Foucault, the...

In this paper, I will examine One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest movie by Foucault’s concepts and thoughts. The first thing that comes to mind when watching the film is Michel Foucault. Because of his studies on various institutions (prisons, hospitals, mental hospitals, etc.) that...