Foucault & Disability draft

Free Write idea generation
Foucault's Discipline & Punish Vintag 1995

11 "But the punishment-body relation is not the same as it was in the torture during public executions. The body now serves as an instrument or intermediary: if one intervenes upon it to imprison it, or to make it work, it is in order to deprive the individual of a liberty that is regarded both as a right and as a property. The body, according to this penalty, is caught up in a system of constraints and privations obligations and prohibitions. Physical pain, the pain of the body itself, is no longer the consituent element of the penalty. From being an art of unbearable sensations punishment has become an economy of suspended rights."

So, the body is a means or tool to leverage as an instrument--the body is no the end goal, but rather a means to achieve another goal.
That goal appears to be to reach an individual person's liberty--and, as stated above that liberty is regarded as both a right and property. If that liberty, right and property, is to be reached, then it must be reached through the body.

Okay, I have a couple concerns about this. First, how can a notion, liberty, be a right and a piece of property? If it is not possible to get it directly, then can it really be a piece of property? also, the next question which develops is, isn't this assuming that liberty is reliant upon the body? and if liberty is reliant upon the body, how can liberty actually be separated from the body? I'm not sure, but i don't like the ease of distinction of the idea of liberty from the body. Similarly, just because someone's body is free does not mean that they have liberty or that they will exercise it. But I may also be over riffing this part. If I understand what Foucault is saying, the end goal has little to do with the body, but the body is the vehicle in order to take some ability, idea, or notion away from the person being punished.

"The body, according to this penalty, is caught up in a system of constraints and privations, obligations, and prohibitions."

This one line seems to connect a great deal with disability and accessibility. In particular, the constraints and privations remind me of physical accessibility to specific sites and physical locations as wll as the in/ability to read/hear/respond to certain kinds of texts, visual/audio/printed, because of impairment. I do not know what this means, but the parallels between the prisoning, the punishment, seems a lot like what happens to many people who have impairments. If you have an impairment, that is perhaps seen as being a physical punishment. If you have been given that physical punishment--for whatever metaphysical or medical reasons--then that automatically qualifies you as a person who HAS already been punished. And since you have already been punished, perhaps that means then that you really have no right or reason to expect accessibility, to expect those things which would or could offer equal liberty of access to resources and activities. That's just one potential reading.

I'm just toying with potential ideas or remixes of F's ideas.