The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Phy ...

Bentham's eighteenth-century Panopticon prison model articulates the importance of visual observation of the body as a tool for the enforcement of social power. For Foucault, the body is subordinated to dominant ideals—rendered “docile”—through the internalization of a judgmental gaze. The subject acquires self-regulation through an illusion of being constantly watched, an effect created by Bentham's design. Thus, “real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation. So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behavior, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy to application, the patient to the observation of regulations” (Foucault, Discipline 202). The Panopticon comes to represent the larger social network through which not just prisoners, but all subjects and their bodies, are disciplined. The aim of that “marvelous machine” the Panopticon is “to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of public morality; to increase and multiply” the authority of the dominant culture (Foucault, Discipline 208). This architectural innovation symbolizes a general cultural shift towards “panopticism” as a mode of social control, in which obedient subjects face “a generalized surveillance” as the “subtle coercion” to conform to the expectations of bourgeoisie society (Foucault, Discipline 209). Bodily spectacles such as public execution are, for Foucault, reinforcements, reminders, and metaphors for this visually enabled social power through which we become disciplined. Imagined in Foucauldian terms, the freak show would serve primarily as a representation of transgression that demonstrates—by contrast and by the subject-affirming power of the gaze—the norms its audience is learning to live up to.

Foucault's most important contribution to disability studies may be his popularization of the concept of the gaze as a source of social power and a tool for the reproduction of norms. While Lacan focuses on the role of the gaze in individual psychology, Foucault describes it as a generalized social force. Foucault's goal is to mechanize the dynamics of power within cultural practice, but his ideas allow room for resistance against restrictive norms. Foucault's work has come to underwrite much of the politicized work of gender and disability theory. Susan Bordo suggests