The Ethics of Foucauldian Poetics: Women's Selves

Although Foucault's analysis of instituted, disciplined selfhood has found application in many fields, poetry on the whole has been neglected, being often seen as a formal discourse removed from wider cultural issues. American women poets, however, here Sylvia Plath and Gwendolyn Brooks, offer in their work on the one hand a powerful representation, confrontation, and enactment of the disciplining of women's bodies in modern American culture. On the other, their work challenges Foucault's extreme reduction of the subject to disciplinary function, as he himself attempted to do in his later writing on ethics of the self. Gwendolyn Brooks in particular affirms resources of selfhood not only in resistance against disciplinary social institutions and critique of them, but also in commitment to community and social ties which situate women and become sources of strength, definition, and transformation.