Military discipline shifted from spectacular punishment to medical normalization

Evidence

In dealing with homosexual violations in the army the authorities never resorted to the spectacular way of castrating the offender that was suggested in the Old Ottoman Criminal Code. To deal with these and other violations the authorities had recourse to a different kind of power, and to a different set of tools by which they attempted to control and manipulate the body of the conscript in a subtle, more cynical manner. By viewing transgressors not as individuals who were to be spectacularly punished, banned or exiled from public space but as subjects to be studied, understood and ultimately cured, the authorities managed to transform the body of the offender from one on which punishment was exhibited to one that became the domain of scholarly, professional concern, and around which disciplines and discourses were produced. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 732

By viewing transgressors not as individuals who were to be spectacularly punished, banned or exiled from public space but as subjects to be studied, understood and ultimately cured, the authorities managed to transform the body of the offender from one on which punishment was exhibited to one that became the domain of scholarly, professional concern, and around which disciplines and discourses were produced. It was this regime of power that was at work in transforming the body of the young recruits into a well-trained, disciplined body of troops. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 732

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The shift from spectacle to medicalized normalization — offender as cured subject rather than punished one — is a dense instantiation of Foucault’s power regimes, showing how the modern state quieted spectacular violence while intensifying subtle control.
• SEED: Article angle: how the rise of ‘curing’ offenders (medicine over punishment) mirrors the founding of modern armies — the body as a domain of scholarly concern rather than a site of public retribution.
• XREF: Foucault’s disciplinary power and the shift from spectacle to surveillance is directly parallel here; echoes the reader’s prior work on silence as a technical regime. — connects to: Military commanders frame urban warfare as surgery on a diseased body — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 1263
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 732