Remembering Foucault: Queer Theory and Disciplinary Power
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Popular post-structural approaches to gender and sexuality take it as axiomatic that disciplinary power constitutes subjectivities, if imperfectly, in an insidious process of domination and social control. While rejecting a project of liberation grounded in the simplistic premise of freedom from power, these formulations nevertheless propose an implicit emancipatory project anchored in the notion that identity discourse is a problem to overcome. In this article I use the sexual and gendered self in the sociological literature as a vehicle to explore more carefully the problem of disciplinary power. My discussion takes two directions. First, I argue that taxonomic discourse may, in some instances, expand upon subjectivities, opening up and empowering, rather than narrowing and setting in stone, the possibilities of self. And second, I argue that late modernity provides the conditions under which some individuals gain reflexive distance from their subject positions to a degree perhaps unparalleled in history. In this context and for these individuals, the multiplicity of available discourses and their often contradictory content come to resemble more a menu of sensitizing options than a regime of social control. Ultimately, I argue that these two observations are not anathema to Foucault’s own research but, are in fact, suggested in his thesis wherein discourse was theorized to establish the limits of self and, under certain conditions, new pathways for self-development. I argue that this more complex conception of disciplinary power is not only more effective in capturing the effects of power but also has the potential to open up important lines of inquiry regarding the sociohistorical conditions that mediate power and its effects.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it