Foucault

Question 1

bio-power

Answer 1

the institutional use of bodies and body practices

for purposes of political, administrative, and economic control.

Question 2

confession

Answer 2

production of discourse as a result of the interrogation of the self (by the self or others, real and imagined), typically with regard to body practices.

Question 3

constructionist view of sexuality

Answer 3

the idea that homosexuality and what it means to be gay vary across history and social context; contrasts with an essentialist, biological view.

Question 4

disciplinary practices

Answer 4

institutional practices (through schools, churches, clinics, prisons, etc.) used to control, regulate, and subjugate individuals, groups, and society as a whole.

Question 5

discourse

Answer 5

categorizations, talk, and silences pertaining to social practices.

Question 6

docile bodies

Answer 6

produced as a result of the various institutional techniques and procedures used to discipline, subjugate, use, and improve individual (and population) bodies.

Question 7

essentialist view of sexuality

Answer 7

the idea that being gay, and the social characteristics associated with being gay, are a natural (essential) part of the gay individual’s biology.

Question 8

genealogy

Answer 8

(of knowledge/power) interconnected social, political, and historical antecedents to, and context for, the emergence of particular ideas/social categories.

Question 9

Panopticon

Answer 9

model (invoked by Foucault) to highlight how disciplinary power works by keeping the individual a constant object of unceasing surveillance/control.

Question 10

politics of truth

Answer 10

idea emphasizing that truth is not, and can never be, independent of power; that all truths are produced by particular power-infused social relationships and social contexts.

Question 11

power

Answer 11

an ongoing circulatory process with no fixed location or fixed points of origin, possession, and resistance.

Question 12

queer theory

Answer 12

rejects the heterosexual/homosexual binary in intellectual thought, culture, and institutional practices; shifts attention from the unequal status of gays and lesbians in (heterosexist) society to instead focus intellectual and political agendas on the fluidity of all sexuality.

Question 13

regime of truth ritual of discourse

Answer 13

institutional system whereby the state and other institutions (government agencies, the military, med- ical and cultural industries) and knowledge producers (e.g., scientists, professors) affirm certain ideas and practices as true and marginalize or silence alternative practices and interpretations.

Question 14

ritual of discourse

Answer 14

society’s orderly, routinized, and power- infused ways (e.g., confession) of producing subjects talking about socially repressed secrets and practices.

Question 15

semiotic code

Answer 15

cultural code or meanings inscribed in language and other symbols in a given societal context.

Question 16

techniques of bio-power

Answer 16

exertion of control over the body/bodies through institutional procedures (e.g., class- room schedules, census categories) and practices (e.g., confession).