ABSTRACT
Unlike disciplinary power, bio-power is primarily directed at the life of the population. Both “life” and “population” are resonant terms for Foucault. “Population” is a notion which, early in the nineteenth century, begins to contest the more traditional terms of the “people” or the “mob”; while “life,” of course, is the category at the foreground of the modern episteme. Bio-power is that aspect of modern power that is aimed at sustaining life throughout society: it organizes society so as to increase production; it cares for, and controls, the social body in the interest of health. It also responds to the generalized problems that followed its own success-that is, rapid population increase and the need for a healthy workforce able to service industrialized factories. The narrative of Chadwick’s reforms and the debates over hygiene and death, given in chapter 3, tell part of the story of bio-power’s extension. In general, bio-power’s technology includes the gathering of social statistics; state investment in, and control over, drainage, burial and quarantine; inoculation; popular education against old folkloric medical beliefs; bureaucratic measures to improve the diet of children, and the medicalization of state administration through the appointment of Public Health Officers. It does not primarily place bodies in a particular spatial pattern as disciplinary power does. Its strategies are less visible. Just as Foucault privileged the prisons as examples of disciplinary power, so, in his account of bio-power, he foregrounds sexuality-on which I will concentrate in the first section of this chapter. The reasons for Foucault’s interest in sex are at least as much political as historical: just as he worked on the prisons as part of the movement around GIP in the late sixties, during the seventies he worked on sexuality as part of a more general movement in which heterosexuality’s claim to normalcy was being contested.
