Michel Foucault
How power, knowledge and institutions shape what we take to be normal.
Ideas
- Power/knowledge
- Power is not only repression. It produces knowledge, categories and kinds of people, and those in turn sustain it.
- Discipline
- Prisons, schools and hospitals train bodies through constant observation, with Bentham's panopticon as the image.
- Genealogy
- Trace how ideas we treat as natural, like madness, criminality and sexuality, were historically made.
In their words
“Where there is power, there is resistance.”
“Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.”
Start with
- Madness and Civilization (1961)
- The Order of Things (1966)
- Discipline and Punish (1975)
- The History of Sexuality (1976–84)
