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The paper examines the historical account of punishing individuals from the earliest civilized societies to the current postmodern era. The notion of punishment is interpreted in the paper as a moral sanction (internal and external), as well as a physical punishment, which over ages turned into torture whose purpose was punishment for punishment's sake, not moral correction of violators of custom or law, to be useful upon their return to society. The transition from torture as a religious ritual to torture which grows into a culture of punishment is pointed out. Punishment in conditions of war and peace has a specific dimension. War as a teacher of violence (Thucydides) in most cases takes away the meaning of punishment which has a moral function in peacetime. But even in times of peace, punishment is relativized. Michel Foucault writes about the contemporary panopticon and the supervision of the individual in society, who is, above all, punished by the institutions of positive morality and remains without personal identity, no longer as a self-conscious individual but as a simple individual. Under the influence of biopolitical power, he is deprived of responsibility for his own existence. He is entangled in invisible threads of social roles, like a spider's web, that he eventually stops being the bearer of. When he wants to make a moral judgment about a social relationship or a phenomenon that does not coincide with his understanding of the social world, he feels powerlessness or remorse because he cannot bear that his isolated value judgment clashes with the interests and public opinion of the dominant social group.

Living with a visible physical disability—specifically dwarfism—brings situational, psychosocial, and cultural challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic, and its restrictions, amplifies these dwarfism-related complexities, exposing the politics of visibility and exclusion, as well as spatial injustices. This autoethnographic paper deliberates these heightened disabling encounters in their various contextual layers—physical, social, and psychological. Fundamentally, people with dwarfism have become further disabled and disadvantaged because of the pandemic's psychosocial stresses, contextual traumas, and physical exclusions. The paper intimately addresses the embodied, psychological, cultural, and spatial inequalities short-statured individuals endure because of the pandemic. Drawing on theoretical models of disability, critical disability literature, geographies of disability, as well as the conceptual paradigm of biopolitical power, the paper begins to make sense of these experiences so that shifts may occur in different spaces. Arguably, the experiences of COVID-19 that are shared here are also applicable to people with other disabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the development of Michel Foucault's thought, the essay aims to emphasize how the urgent and current problem of security actually emerges as a constituent device correlated to the decline of the new art of modern government, defined by Foucault himself as governmentality, what biopolitical power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]