Discipline and Punishment in the Discourse of Legal Decisions on Rape Trials

Abstract

This chapter investigates the pedagogical role played by the discourse of English legal decisions on rape trials. This analysis owes a lot to the work of Michel Foucault, in particular to his book Discipline and Punish (1991) which traces the evolution of criminal justice systems from Medieval torture to Enlightenment’s punishment to modern discipline. Foucault argues that until the late eighteenth century, punishment was frequently the public spectacle of torture: prisoners would be flogged, put on the pillory and even executed in open squares. From then on, however, the entire economy of punishment began to change: torture disappeared as a public spectacle, punishment became the most hidden part of the penal process, and the body ceased to be the only target of penal repression. The body began to be exposed to new techniques that aimed to render it ‘docile’, in other words able to be subjected, used, transformed and improved. In Foucault’s words, ‘these methods, which made possible the meticulous control of the operations of the body, which assured the constant subjection of its forces and imposed upon them a relation of docility-utility, might be called “disciplines”’ (1991, p. 137; my emphasis).