Edward Said is regarded as the originator of colonial discourse theory. He deploys Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse to accomplish his project in Orientalism and emphasizes Foucault’s notion of discourse and its relation to power, rendering discourse a carceral system. Although Said explicitly expresses the similarity between Orientalism and Foucault’s discourse theory, it seems he...

Testimony to Muzil: Hervé Guibert, Michel Foucault, and the "Medical Gaze" examines the fictional/autobiographical AIDS writings of the French writer Hervé Guibert. Locating Guibert's writings alongside the work of his friend Michel Foucault, the article explores how they echo Foucault's evolving notions of the "medical gaze." The article also explores how Guilbert's narrators and Guibert himse...

I propose that Foucault‟s works, since he wrote Discipline and Punish, rely on an implicit meta-theory that is compatible with the fundamentals of Critical Realism. To this end I examine the status of truth, methodology and social ontology used by Foucault. If this thesis is correct, then a critical realist reading of Michel Foucault would avoid some of the pitfalls that have been attributed to...

When I began to study the rules, duties, and prohibitions of sexuality, the interdictions and restrictions associated with it, I was concerned not simply with the acts that were permitted and forbidden but with the feelings represented, the thoughts, the desires one might experience, the drives to seek within the self any hidden feeling, any movement of the soul, any desire disguised under illu...