What is Violence?

What is Violence?

What is violence and how do we distinguish between representations of violence and acts of violence. How do constructions of violence differ historically? Examining different representations of violence in music, the media, photography, art and film, this first lecture will introduce the topic of violence, by asking the question, how do we know what we know about violence?

2)Power and the Subject
Rather than simply analysing the most obvious forms of repression and violence, Foucault’s work has examined various modes of classification through which subjects’ personal and social identities are made meaningful. In Discipline and Punish Foucault reveals how the relations between power and knowledge are instrumental to the formation of different types of social subjects (the “criminal”, “ delinquent”, “good citizen” etc.). Using prison culture as a prime example, we will examine how disciplinary technologies of the body function.
Readings and Questions
Michel Foucault, excerpts from Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, reprinted in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow. London, England: Penguin, 1991. First published in French in 1973.
i. “The Body of the Condemned” pp. 170-178 ; ii. “Docile Bodies” pp. 179-187 ; iii. “ Panopticism” pp. 206-213

Questions to guide your reading:
• Why does Foucault want to examine punishment as a complex social function?
• What does Foucault mean when he speaks of ‘docile bodies’?
• How does the panopticon function as a mechanism of surveillance?
Additional Readings
Paul Patton, ‘Foucault’s Subject of Power’ in The Later Foucault, (ed) Jeremy Moss, London: Sage, 1998, 64-77.
3)Sexuality and Transgression
In The History of Sexuality Foucault is interested in the modern West’s obsession with the “truth” of sexuality. In examining the way in which discourses surrounding sex have been produced Foucault offers an important account of the relation between knowledge, power and pleasure. Drawing on his account of the “repressive hypothesis” as well as Bataille’s analysis of eroticism in terms of a dynamic of transgression and taboo, we will examine how sexuality has become perhaps the most significant category for describing the modern self.
Readings and Questions
– Michel Foucault, “We ‘Other Victorians’” and “The Repressive Hypothesis” from The History of Sexuality Vol 1, reprinted in The Foucault Reader, (ed) Paul Rabinow, London: Penguin Books, 1991. First published in French in 1976.
– Vartan Messier, “Erotisme as Transgression in the Writings of Georges Bataille: From savoir to jouissance” in Transgression and Taboo. Critical Essays, (eds) Vartan Messier and Nandita Batra, Mayaguez, PR: CEACC, 2005.

Questions to guide your reading:
• What is the repressive hypothesis?
• Why, according to Bataille, are transgression and taboo central to sexual pleasure?
• How might a theory of transgression help us to understand non-normative sexual practices?

Additional Readings:
– Georges Bataille, “Sexual Plethora and Death” in Eroticism, London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1994. First published in French in 1957.
– Michel Foucault (1963), ‘A Preface to Transgression,’ in Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1985: Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, Vol.2, (ed) James Faubion, Translated by Robert Hurley, Penguin, 2000.
– Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. London: Methuen, 1986.
– Mandy Merck, ‘The Feminist Ethics of Lesbian S/M,’ in Perversions: Deviant Readings, New York: Routledge, 1993, 236-266.
– Jon Simons “Theoretical Transgression of Limits” in Foucault and the Political. London”Routledge, 1995.
– Jonathon Dollimore, ‘The Cultural Politics of Perversion: Augustine, Shakespeare, Freud, Foucault,’ in Textual Practice, vol. 4, No. 2 (Summer), 1990, 179-196.
GCST 2604 Case Study Assignment Summer 2013
(2000 words)

This assignment is designed to gauge your general understanding of the course concepts and your ability to apply them critically to a specific example/s from media and/or social discourse. The assignment is to be completed as a formal essay with footnoting, bibliography etc.

Select an example/s of a representation of violence from the news media, television, a documentary, law reports, advocacy and/or support services’ websites.

Analyse your example using at least TWO of the central concepts that we have examined in the course to date. Examples include: power, disciplinary technologies, risk, transgression, difference, docile bodies.

• You may wish to draw on some of the secondary concepts that we have touched on: consent, “hate crime”, self-surveillance, safety maps, rape scripts etc…
• You have the option of applying your chosen concepts to a single example or alternatively, a comparative study using two or more examples. Should you choose the second option, each example must be covered in some depth in relation to your choose concepts.

Use standard essay formatting with introduction, body of argument and conclusion. All cited work must be referenced appropriately in text and listed in your bibliography.

 
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