Out of the Box

  • Basak Ulukose

'What was then being formed was a policy of coercions that act on the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behaviour. The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it...Thus, discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, "docile" bodies' (Foucault 1977: 138-9). Gender definitive existence in the social and professional world, as examined by Foucault in Discipline and Punish sets some solid foundations on studies of positioning of women in isolated establishments and institutions of society such as family, military, work place as well as the disciplinary practices that manipulates it in segments of productivity, capacity, skills and abilities. The constant surveillance strategy created by this practice dominating the mind and psychological state causing 'conscious and permanent visibility' (Foucault 1977: 201) that’s internalised by the individual to form a kind of self awareness that fits the definitions by the performers of dominating power in practice. Subjects of this project, bring out the most casual but vital impacts of this ‘power’ in their own experiences with sequences of stories from their very lives, each of which re-enacted by subject specific settings that are created in the light of impressions by one specific quote from each woman that I conducted interviews with. The mutual feeling of dysphoria by the commoditisation of female body in each narrative, brought the concepts of ‘boxing’ , ‘wrapping’, and ‘disposing’ to the elements of visuals. The subjects participation in this project has become an attempt an action and reaction to the feeling of being stuffed, stored and disposed in and out of the boxes as created and organised by the power in practice that’s patriarchal. Subject consist of women active professional and social life, an engineer, a transportation business manager, a pole dancer and instructor...