This is my response to readings for the class Mediating The Bio-Political Body.
“Power has no control over death,” said Foucault in his Biopolitics lectures, “but it can control mortality.” Tracing the emergence of techniques of power in the 17th century, Foucault observes that these forms of power were centered on the individual body rather than the collective body. In effect, sovereign power amounted to the simple fact that the leader could kill his subject at any moment. With the emergence of new power mechanisms in the 18th century, power was applied not to “man-as-body” but to “man-as-living-being.” In other words, biopolitics deals with the population as a political and biological problem. Under these new power structures, the sovereign possesses the power of regularization, the power of making life and letting die.
Foucault argues that our current society is essentially a superimposing of these two technologies of power: power over the individual body and power over a mass of bodies. The first power is disciplinary and manipulates the body as “a source of forces that have to be rendered useful,” while the second power “brings together the mass effects characteristic of a population and tries to control the random events that can occur in a living mass.”
In modern society, the pairing of these technologies of power has distinct implications. We see governments increasingly controlling the reproduction rate, fertility rate, birth/death rate, resulting in the development of medicine whose main function is public hygiene, sex education, and medical care. As the intersection of body and population, sexuality falls under the domain of both techniques of power and is therefore subject to both discipline and regularization.
