Disruptive Bodies

Abstract

What types of transformation might be possible from a Panopticon-like social structure? This chapter analyses conversational data from high-achieving participants—members of a university women’s hockey club—who do not resist, but identify with the social structures they describe. As in Foucault’s work, where the biggest danger to the social body is the undisciplined human body, the biggest danger to the accounts analysed in this chapter are their descriptions of the undisciplined body of a fellow team member named ‘Nemo’. The danger Nemo presents is also a transformative possibility, specifically, an understanding of a social world in which each participant is at the embodied centre of her own experience, in unique relationships with the other individual, potentially ‘anomalous’ members.