The race marker and the power of control over the body

a study in the light of Foucaldian conceptions

Abstract

This article examines how, throughout history, racism has functioned as a technology of disciplinary power directed at Black bodies, drawing on Foucault’s (1987) reflections on the production of docile, useful, and manageable bodies. By understanding the body as a surface on which power is inscribed and as a privileged target of disciplinary practices, we analyze how the social marker of race has been historically constituted as a device of domination that legitimizes physical, symbolic, and epistemic violence. Grounded in this framework, we examine how Beyoncé and Sojourner Truth reveal different modes of capture, control, and circulation of images of Black women. The combined analysis of these cases allows us to identify the persistence of controlling images that update colonial logic and keep Black bodies under surveillance, domestication, and stigmatization. We conclude that such mechanisms reinforce the need to understand the articulation between power, race, and the body as a central axis for analyzing contemporary forms of subjugation, as well as for questioning false forms of representativity that often merely reconfigure old structures of oppression.