The search to comply with socially imposed standards of identity has justified and instituted a number of ways of body control. During the last two centuries we have lived under an ongoing process of discipline and normalization of our bodies. This process has subjective consequences because subjectivity is directly connected to the materiality of the body. Therefore, a history of creation of bodies and social identities is also a history of ways of producing subjectivity. This paper starts with this history to discuss a form of resistance: Michel Foucault's proposal of an aesthetics of existence.
Body; Subjectivity; Control; Subjection; Aesthetics of the Self