by Kyla Wazana Tompkins

About Kyla Wazana Tompkins

Kyla Wazana Tompkins (she/her) is Associate Professor at Pomona College. She is the author of Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century and the forthcoming Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot. She is also the author of the article “We Aren’t Here to Learn What We Already Know” in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Biopower

book Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies

Biopower is a theory that describes how political power works by investing itself in the biological life of individuals and populations. First developed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in his 1978 book The History of Sexuality, biopower has become a term of critical importance to scholars of gender, sexuality, race, colonialism, and imperialism (Foucault [1978] 1990). The concept of biopower gives us the tools to connect the body, long a site of feminist interest, to the disciplining power of scientific, medical, legal, anthropological, statistical, and aesthetic knowledges while also building a critique of the internal bureaucratic functioning of the liberal state.