A Comparative Study of Foucauldian Models of Discipline in Nazik Al-Malaika’s “Cholera” and Camisha Jones’s “On Working Remotely”

Ziady, Riham Ahmed

doi:10.21608/tjhss.2023.180237.1145

A Comparative Study of Foucauldian Models of Discipline in Nazik Al-Malaika’s “Cholera” and Camisha Jones’s “On Working Remotely”

Document Type : Original papers

Author

Riham Ahmed Ziady

Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts, Alexandria University, Egypt

10.21608/tjhss.2023.180237.1145

Abstract

The Foucauldian conceptualizations of the disciplinary mechanisms implemented by the medical supervision of contagions and disability are noticeable in both Nazik Al-Malaika’s “Cholera” and Camisha L. Jones’s “On Working Remotely & No Longer Commuting with Chronic Pain.” Written by an Iraqi poet about the 1947 cholera epidemic in Egypt, Al-Malaika’s poem illustrates the characteristics of the social quarantine dictated by disciplinary governments. In Society Must Be Defended (2003), Foucault postulates that the confinement of citizens is a precautionary measure by which state power aims to overrule death. The ungovernability of death redirects power towards a dominance over the living. Jones’s poem, compounding disability and a pandemic, depicts the intersectional disciplinary schemes which regulate illnesses during the Covid-19 crisis in the U.S. The poet’s personal experience with hearing loss and chronic pain informs her knowledge of disciplinary mandates. Published in 2021, the poem evidences that governmental control over subjects naturally evolves into a morbidity-regulating biopower. Foucault’s discussion of “panopticism” in Discipline and Punish (1995) suggests that the disabled speaker in the poem is an ungrudging perpetuator of an abstruse surveillance system. In addition, the poem proves the continuation of state regulation of plague-ridden places that is delineated in Al-Malaika’s poem. Despite the contextual and authorial differences, both poems portray illness as an instrument wielded by disciplinary authorities in the 20th and 21st centuries.

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