Biopower
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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. The theory of biopower is also a specific elaboration of the relationship that Foucault calls power-knowledge, a term that describes how power is made and circulated through accepted forms of knowledge and method, including scientific understanding and forms of empirical “truth.” The theory of biopower allows scholars to analyze how power is diffused and connected across multiple scales, from the penetrations of power into our most intimate selves (for instance, at the level of the relationship between our desires and our identities, also known as “sexuality”) all the way up to state and nonstate projects, like medicine, psychiatry,...
This essay may be found on page 29 of the printed volume.