Tag Archives: racism

Soulless Embodiment

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“The body now serves as an instrument or intermediary: if one intervenes upon it to imprison it, or to make it work, it is in order to deprive the individual of liberty that is regarded both as a right and as property. The body, according to this penalty, is caught up in a system of constraints and privations, obligations and prohibitions. Physical pain, the pain of the body itself, is no longer the constituent element of the penalty. From being an art of unbearable sensations punishment has become an economy of suspended rights. If it is still necessary for the law to reach and manipulate the body of the convict, it will be at a distance, in the proper way, according to strict rules, and with a much ‘higher’ aim.”

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage 2nd ed. 1991), p. 11. Continue reading →

Incorporating the imagined body

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Since I watched controversial Russian ice dancers Domnina’s and Shabalin‘s faux Australian aboriginal folk routine earlier this week during the 2010 Olympics “original” ice dance competition, I have been thinking about how the cultural “other” is imagined and enacted to reproduce notions of cultural authority and power.

More specifically, I have addressed in other essays on my blog the importance of the culturally imagined/defined body as a site of colonization and imperial control.  Indeed, the body as an experienced reality is simultaneously a metaphor that is ideologically mapped with value and power in cultural, economic, and political/ideological terms.  It would be difficult to dispute the assertion that fundamental to any examination of social and ideological relations of power, bodies and the way they are imagined would be at its center implicitly, if not explicitly. Continue reading →

Will it be Barry or Barack?

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Growing up working class and biracial in Utah, son of a Mexican American man and Scots-Irish woman, in a white, politically conservative, Mormon community, I was always reminded to “not cause problems.”

Especially by my Mexican American father.

It made sense to me as a young boy, at the time.

I considered myself a “Mormon” boy, preparing to inherit a spiritual wealth of blessings if I simply obeyed the Ten Commandments as most good Christian boys understood them and acted within the additional spiritual obligations that Mormon boys understood to be their future rights. Continue reading →

Mika’s cultural angst

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I’ve been up for almost two hours this morning. (It’s 6:50 am as I type this.) I guess six hours of sleep was enough rest.

Baldo and Chica were in their selected sleeping sites, but anticipating my rise.

I got up, performed my regular routine including feeding the kids and letting them outside.

While I was brewing my morning java and making breakfast sandwiches for me and dad I occasionally glanced at the TV broadcast of Joe Scarborough’s “Morning Joe” to get some reliably annoying neo-con conventional wisdom.

I don’t know why I watch the show—I originally started watching it while I lived in St. Paul, Minnesota last year, during a one-year visiting assistant professorship at the University of Minnesota—but it wakes me up and motivates me in subconsciously useful ways. Continue reading →