According to Foucault, discipline produces subjected and practised bodies and t his kind of regulatory, discursive, disciplinary way of understanding the body gives rise to a new ‘political anatomy'. The body is made political, a site for the mechanics of power. In a book on Michel Foucault two well known scholars Hubert L Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow refer to the ways of political anatomy as:

Hysteria was seen as a condition that emanated from the body and women were seen as particularly suffering from it. There were several techniques in the nineteenth century by which hysteria was understood and therefore the cure of hysteria was also based on such a gendered view. So this is the way the female body was made ‘docile', ‘subjected' to the discourse of hysteria. Sexual activity that led to procreation was not a simple choice of two individuals. It was socialized, made docile through certain prescriptive behaviours which the procreative body was supposed to follow.

Next, those who were found to indulge in sexual deviations were appropriated by the discipline of psychiatry in a bid to normalize those practises. Fourth, there was a confessional technology involving and encouraging confessions about the body, or certain indulgences with the body or confessions of not following the prescribed way as far as the body is concerned. So Dreyfus and Rabinow show that these are some of the ways in which the nineteenth century human sciences appropriated the body.