Filming the Discipline of Sexuality: Using Foucault to Analyze The Children's Hour and Boys Don't Cry Anonymous College

Discipline is concerned with the maintenance of social norms and order. Discipline is defined by French sociologist Michel Foucault as a process of “uninterrupted, constant coercion, supervising the processes of the activity rather than its result”, which creates compliant bodies (1975, p.137). Bodies and behaviours are controlled to act in a socially acceptable way through the threat and exercise of punishment. Through studying how gender and sexual expression is disciplined in the films The Children’s Hour by William Wyler and Boy’s Don’t Cry by Kimberly Pierce, the audience gains an insight into how discipline functions, both inter-personally and institutionally.

In The Children’s Hour, silence is used to isolate Martha and Karen, depriving them of power and punishing them for their perceived homosexuality which has invited discipline. Silence, whether it be the silencing of knowledge or genuine feelings, is used to enforce discipline upon the two women, which renders them powerless. In this case, silence is a “small act”, as Foucault says, which enacts a “certain mode of detailed political investment of the body, a 'new micro-physics' of power” (p.139). Silence dispossesses the dissents of a voice and the power to resist...