The Dynamics of Power: Michel Foucault’s Legacy on Social Control and Governance
By WPS News Staff ReportersBaybay City | December 15, 2025
In the realm of social theory and philosophy, few figures have influenced contemporary thinking on power, governance, and social control as profoundly as Michel Foucault. Born on October 15, 1926, in Poitiers, France, Foucault’s work has permeated various disciplines, including sociology, political science, and cultural studies,…
Embodied Cognition and Praxis: Reclaiming the Integral Self Against Reductionism - part 1
The concept of embodiment within cognitive science and contemplative traditions constitutes a profoundly intricate terrain of intellectual inquiry, one that resists facile reduction and demands an integrative approach, both theoretically and pragmatically.
Photo by KATRIN BOLOVTSOVA on Pexels.com
This post seeks to interrogate and expand the conventional boundaries of embodied cognition by…
Biopower Challenges in Contemporary Health Education
In the chapter “Right of death and power over life,” from The History of Sexuality (vol. I), Foucault explains that, in the past, the ruler’s power appeared above all as the right to take life; that is, it was within his competence to determine someone’s death or to let live. Over time, this mode of domination changed. Instead of showing itself mainly through the threat of death, power came to…
Controlling Death- Foucault’s Biopower and the Discipline of the Dead
Is Plastination just science, or a way of controlling how we experience death?
Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower refers to how modern institutions exert control over life by regulating bodies and populations. The medical system, in particular, disciplines the body through diagnosis, surveillance, and yes, display.
Plastination, when viewed through this lens, is part of a broader social mechanism that disciplines and sanitizes death.
Making Death Manageable
In traditional death rituals, the body decomposes, is mourned, and is buried. Plastination disrupts this process. The corpse doesn’t rot or smell; it’s dry, clean, and frozen in a lifelike posture. In a sense, it has been “corrected"—made educational and non-threatening.
Tony Walter (2004) describes how plastinated specimens lack the messiness of real death. They represent an idealized form of the body, stripped of decay and emotion.
Plastination can be seen as a form of biopolitical control: death, made palatable and instructive.
Death as Spectacle
Foucault might argue that plastination exhibits turn the dead into surveilled bodies- watched by the public, studied without resistance, completely exposed. It’s not just science; it’s power exercised on the most intimate scale: the human body after life.
Why It Matters Sociologically
Foucault’s theory invites us to consider who can define what happens to a body after death. It also pushes us to ask: What kind of death is allowed in public view? And whose deaths are kept hidden?
By controlling how death is presented, plastination reinforces social norms around what is "acceptable,” “educational,” or “aesthetic”- and removes the rawness of mortality from public life.
Sources:
Walter, Tony. 2004. “Body Worlds: Clinical Detachment and Anatomical Awe.” Sociology of Health & Illness 26(4):464-488.
Gavin Newsom wakes up to find the Trump administration has frozen Title X funding.
Let’s be clear: This isn’t policy. This is ideological sterilization.
Title X was never radical. It was founded by Nixon—the same Nixon who bombed Cambodia. Even he understood: Empires still need the poor to reproduce under supervision.
Now? Even that facade is unnecessary. Care is treason. Birth control is rebellion. Cancer screenings are too generous.
This isn’t conservative policy—it’s bio-political punishment. When the state wants fewer poor people, it doesn’t offer help. It simply removes the option to live.
My designer for this project is Ben, and we’re working with the article “Biopower to the People” with The Walrus magazine.
For this first session, we discussed the concept and went through the creative brief. The Walrus has a defined style, so we didn’t add new things to it, but we did agree that a blue or green color palette would match better with the article. Besides that, we agreed on everything else.
rage is a healthy appropriate reaction to certain things, but it is always treated as an evil to overcome in modern psych, or even a scarlet letter of willingness to commit evil. you can never yell, you can never hit things, even if they’re inanimate and designated for it. it’s too scary, too dangerous, too “out of control”. whole realms of human experience that are unavoidable and reasonable in response to horrible real experiences and situations are vilified, pathologized, denied, invalidated, to turn them into guilt, shame, and accompanying fear and doubt. one’s sense of justice, self-worth, and passion are eroded, and if you trust these professionals in your weakness and desire to geow, this shame and fear is internalized, and you’re left impotent and scared, with no way to process these feelings and no way to channel them to meaningful practice or expression.
Chapter 11. ‘fucking close to water’: queering the production of the nation by Bruce Erickson (part 2, final)
Land
First ‘canoe’ that European colonists saw were likely Mi’kmaq gwitnn, birchbark boats designed for both ocean and river travel (318)
The colonist’s name is mentioned but the natives in these stories don’t ever get their names so…the colonist realized that to go further inland he would need the gwitn, he needed “the boat derived of the landscape realities of the new world” (Raffan 1999a, 24) (318)
the ‘canoe’ as a symbol unique to Canada (Jennings 1991, 1) (319), reworks essentialized aspects of indigenous cultures into a symbol of national health and success” (319) and as a “gift” from natives to settlers. The canoe as unique entity, because of the exploration done by canoe, the canoe is the guard that maintains the boundary of Canadian identity.
A vague connection could be made to the American symbol of the cowboy to the American west except the canoe is more ‘natural’ for being of the land and from the native people and further substantiated in its uniqueness by its use in colonialism.
Canada as a nation has ‘perfected’ the canoe; the only way the canoe can be made perfect is through its ability to be incorporated into European expansion (320) the connection of the land to the canoe as a discourse of inevitability illustrates the privileging of the European subject as the natural inheritors (indeed, the rightful inheritor) of First Nations land…and implicitly heterosexual and patriarchal subject (320-321)
Possibility
“We cannot possibly anticipate what might happen, if we were really to consider the ten million bodies at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean “(Shannon Winnubst, 190) (324)
“Rethinking nature that is not bent toward the utility of power” (324) Opening ourselves to the possibilities of history means addressing the ways in which the ideologies and concrete practices that have formed our current understanding of nature represent more about the desired human outcome than they do about anything nonhuman (324)
Similar to really considering 10 million dead bodies in the Atlantic Ocean, this would mean really considering (as a broad list) the malicious wars over land and fur, the forced conversions, the repeated exposure to flu epidemics, the establishment of reservations and classification of First Nations as wards of the state, and the widespread physical and sexual abuse in residential schools designed to assimilate and civilize a supposed “savage” population” (324).
The Kiss of the Fur Queen is a novel by Tomson Highway, Cree playwright and novelist. Two Cree brothers are taken from their parents to a residential school several hundred miles away at the age of six, baptized into the Catholic church and have their names changed, they forbidden to speak their language and are abused by the priests of the school. They are alienated from their parents by the education and sexual predation of the school priests, but also are disconnected from the land, language and culture of their people…(the canoe plays a central role in the story, where difficult conversations about their alienation take place). As they grow up one of the brothers finds “continual inspiration” from the traditional Cree culture and discovered a “need to know the cultures that were suppressed by the residential school”. “As the crowd dances to the migisoo, the eagle, Gabriel realizes its power: ‘Gabriel saw people talking to the sky, the sky replying.” (Highway 1998) (324-326) (this is a poor summary, i apologize.)
“The movement between tradition and innovation is always fluid and uncharted” (327)
“Thus, while as a quirky national joke, the idea of making love in a canoe surely belongs to the post-sexual revolution of the later twentieth century, we need to remember that as a national symbol, the connection it strives to make between the canoe, nature, and nation signals a sexual politic that was born of the age of imperialism. “
“As Foucault reminds us, the legacy of the Victorian repression of sexuality is held within the resistance of the sexual revolution that fails to move outside the biopower networks of modern sexuality.” (327)
The Foucauldian Lens of Destructive Creations’ Hatred
Description of the Game’s Dark and Disturbing Themes
In 2015, Destructive Creations released a controversial video game called Hatred, which received strong criticism for depicting gratuitous violence. The game centers around “The Antagonist,” a nihilistic killer character who targets law enforcement officers and innocent civilians to create maximum destruction and chaos. The game’s dark and…
Just started reading The Master and Margarita, and I’m blown away by the overwhelming magical realist-ness of this thing
I don’t know whether this is because it’s based on a legend or whether it’s the way it was written, but something makes the standard mundanity of the Soviet 1930s feel incredibly surreal
The narrator: “We hadn’t been eating well lately because the supply of bread was getting low. When our food ran out, we wrote poems instead.”
“But if you wrote poems to get by, why didn’t you write poems before you ran out of food?”
“That would have been like begging. As you know, writers never beg.”
