The Paradox of Protection: A Feminist Analysis of the Docile Female Bodies in The Water Cure

Abstract

Sophie Mackintosh's The Water Cure (2018) depicts three sisters raised in isolation, their bodies subjected to disciplinary "cures" in the name of protection and survival. Existing scholarship has read the novel through eco-feminism, immunising insularity, and meta-modernism, but has not examined its female characters through the lens of embodied docility. Drawing on Michel Foucault's concept of docility in Discipline and Punish and Sandra Bartky's feminist extension of it, this paper argues that the novel constructs docile female bodies through three interlocking mechanisms: moralising control as protection, curbing autonomy through internalised self-surveillance, and regulating female sexuality under the premise of survival. Reading these mechanisms together, the paper shows how power operates on women's bodies not through overt coercion but by reframing oppression as care, a dynamic that extends Foucault’s and Bartky's theories into a contemporary dystopian register and clarifies how protection rhetoric can function as a mechanism of control.