Biopower
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.