of course Foucault

I was introduced to Michel Foucault in a course my 2nd quarter in ARNP school by Professor David G. Allen.  The course had a title something like Mental Illness in Prison and I decided to take the class based on the required books in the Health Sciences Bookstore.  Actually it was one required book in particular, Discipline & Punish. It was the cover that hooked me--hand cuffs & electric chair I believe. IDK where that first Foucault book got off to. It might have been among the books my partner at the time strongly urged me to get out of the house once the ink was dry on the paper my committee signed saying I'd done enough to earn that PhD. Foucault about drove me out of my mind.

I honestly don't know why it caught my eye or why I thought I had to study it, but it did catch my eye and I did study it for 9 years. Possibly because the book looked so out of place in the nursing text shelves that I thought it might give me some relief from what I knew was ahead. Not that I'm into bondage or anything. Really. I'm not.   I took the class. It changed my life, literally. (It changed my life again, really, if I am honest.) It changed my life to such a degree that I felt compelled to take pictures of the Foucault library in my academic study throughout the ordeal. Probably to prove to myself that I had done this thing, had this obsession someday long in the future when my congenital forgetting brain function had deleted these traumatic memories.  My academic advisor wasn't very excited when I enrolled in the class because she thought it was more philosophically than clinically focused. We primarily read the Foucault book, Discipline & Punish,  and some other Foucault essays from Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. We might have read some other materials, but I do not remember them.  I could just barely understand Foucault and had to read the assignments over and over to get anything out of it.

Stuff like this Sparknotes synopsis wasn't available, or at least I could not find it.  I had to listen carefully during class discussions (Dr. Allen does not lecture) to see what I missed or misunderstood in the readings. I took every course that David taught in any department even if I could not use the subject matter or the methods in my dissertation research. Looking back, it appears that I intentionally colonized myself with Foucault.  I was hooked, mesmerized, and could not stop trying to understand Foucault.   I felt that I finally had an explanation for my lifelong vague sense of paranoia that there were powers and principalities operating in our society, just out of sight, defining us at birth & before, controlling our options, choices, possibilities.  I had never put together the the power/knowledge aspect but it resonated deeply when I began to understand it.  I readily grokked the concept of the docile body , understood that I knew & had known quite a few docile bodies and that I have never been a very good docile body myself. I've been resisting normalization since the beginning of my time on this hard rock planet. I was sneaking around on two separate mid career National Library of Medicine Medical Informatics fellowships to pay for this subersive postmodern social justice education that I was treating myself to. When my partner fully explained the communication between horse and rider in English riding, the comparison of discipline to dressage consolidated these concepts for me.  For a brief overview of terms Foucault uses check here.  For me, Foucault's ideas do not just apply to prison or the carceral system, but to the world at large. It's obvoius to me everywhere now and that bastard, Foucault, still talks in my head.

Amazon search for Michel Foucault and Postmodernism