Agency and the body
, Agency (Mills, 2004)
• Agency ties into notions of free-will
• Agency has a complicated place in discursive approaches
• How much control do you have over your actions if discourse is so pervasive
• Discourse is also interested in intended and unintended outcomes
• How much do you control the consequences of your actions
Agency (Burr, 2015)
• For Foucault, the human being is at the end of discourse, the individual was not the focus of
his theories
• “Amounts to little more than seeing them [people] as puppets operated by
structures they cannot see” (p. 140)
• BUT…Foucault did state that people are capable of “critical historical reflection”
• Change through engaging with marginalised and repressed discourses
• The first step to resistance? Identifying and recategorizing discourses
Resistance is social (Burr, 2015)
• Discourses hold social power
• In resisting/challenging these discourses we, therefore, also challenge “their associated
practices, structures, and power relations”
• There may be resistance to our resistance…
Example: The ‘fat’ body
• The ‘fat’ body has been positioned as sitting outside of the normative frameworks. It is
associated with,
• Moral failure (Saguy, 2013)
• Exploiting or burdening others and systems (Allender & Rayner, 2007) -
biocitizenship
• Often in need of prevention/transformation (Donnelly et al., 2009)
• Taking a neoliberalist discourse, and drawing on Foucauldian theory the docile/good
‘fat’ body would be the body that is trying to change through diet(ing) and exercise
(LeBesco, 2011)
• SO…what happens when someone doesn’t do this?
Example of resistance?: Fat Acceptance
• Guthman and DuPluis (2006)
, Agency (Mills, 2004)
• Agency ties into notions of free-will
• Agency has a complicated place in discursive approaches
• How much control do you have over your actions if discourse is so pervasive
• Discourse is also interested in intended and unintended outcomes
• How much do you control the consequences of your actions
Agency (Burr, 2015)
• For Foucault, the human being is at the end of discourse, the individual was not the focus of
his theories
• “Amounts to little more than seeing them [people] as puppets operated by
structures they cannot see” (p. 140)
• BUT…Foucault did state that people are capable of “critical historical reflection”
• Change through engaging with marginalised and repressed discourses
• The first step to resistance? Identifying and recategorizing discourses
Resistance is social (Burr, 2015)
• Discourses hold social power
• In resisting/challenging these discourses we, therefore, also challenge “their associated
practices, structures, and power relations”
• There may be resistance to our resistance…
Example: The ‘fat’ body
• The ‘fat’ body has been positioned as sitting outside of the normative frameworks. It is
associated with,
• Moral failure (Saguy, 2013)
• Exploiting or burdening others and systems (Allender & Rayner, 2007) -
biocitizenship
• Often in need of prevention/transformation (Donnelly et al., 2009)
• Taking a neoliberalist discourse, and drawing on Foucauldian theory the docile/good
‘fat’ body would be the body that is trying to change through diet(ing) and exercise
(LeBesco, 2011)
• SO…what happens when someone doesn’t do this?
Example of resistance?: Fat Acceptance
• Guthman and DuPluis (2006)
