Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :Foucault and the Government of Disability
[W]hen relations of power are construed as government, that is, the direction of conduct, governmental practices should be understood to include not only state-generated prohibitions and punishments, and global networks of social, economic, and political stratification (the deleterious effects of which congeal disproportionately along disabling, racialized, and gendered lines), but also normalizing technologies facilitate the systematic objectivization of subjects as deaf, criminal, mad, and so on, and techniques of self-improvement and self-transformation such as weight-loss programs and fitness regimes, assertiveness training, Botox injections, breast implants, psychotherapy, and rehabilitation.
For despite the fact that power appears to be merely repressive, the most effective exercise of power, according to Foucault, consists in guiding the possibilities of conduct and putting in order the possible outcomes. The concealment of these practices, these limits of possible conduct, allows the discursive formulation in which they circulate to be naturalized and legitimized. That is to say, the production of these seeming acts of choice (these limits of possible conduct) on the everyday level of the subject makes possible the consolidation of more hegemonic structures.
Wow. You know Foucault is crazy smart—and crazy hard—when it takes an encyclopedia and a translator to translate the translator!
Basically, Tremain is taking Foucault's ideas of biopower and of the creation of the "disciplined" subject and applying them to our modern concept of disability. She says that Foucault has taught us that power operates through forces that govern in the literal sense of government institutions, prisons, schools, legislative bodies, etc., but also in the figurative sense of shaping how citizens think and act.
In fact, it's the figurative sense of government that is even more important because—unlike prisons and schools and hospitals in which authority figures are enforcing the code of conduct, telling the subject what to do and ensuring that s/he does it—in the figurative sense of government, it's the individual him/herself who is (supposedly) choosing how to behave.
And here's where it gets even trickier, because this question of choice is what's so slippery. See, Tremain explains here that Foucault is teaching us that the idea of choice is actually false; it's a fiction based on what we have been taught in our society to perceive as normal behavior and belief.
So, while we think that we're choosing to join a gym, to get a haircut, to go to the doctor, to go to school, etc., we're actually not making a choice at all. Instead, we're just following the scripts that we've been taught since birth because this is what we have learned to think of, unquestioningly, as right, good, and desirable.
This, for Foucault, is the true exercise of power—not when you can get someone to submit to a person with greater authority, but when you can get the individual him/herself to internalize these ideas of the norm, of the right and proper. Because then the person will self-police and self-discipline, adopting the values and behaviors that support the status quo (and the power structures the status quo is built on).
Though Foucault had based these ideas primarily around the examples of prisons, schools, and the military, Tremain applies them to disability by showing that Foucault's concepts work even better in regard to disability and the reality that the ways we understand the normal/abnormal, the well/sick, the functional/dysfunctional are all about our modern power structures. We seek medical treatment, therapy, rehabilitation, etc., all to bring ourselves back to "acceptable" limits of the norm.
We do this to ensure that our bodies, minds, and emotions look and work as they should, playing their assigned parts to make sure our modern world continues to operate smoothly. In other words, our modern ideas of disability are all about making sure bodies fall in line, are quiet and, in Foucault's words, "docile."
And the best way to do that is to make it look and feel like we're doing the things we do to "tame" our wild bodies because we want to do them, not because we have to.