ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates Michel Foucault privileged the prisons as examples of disciplinary power, so, in his account of bio-power, he foregrounds sexuality. The concept of the dispositif which, in various forms, had always been important for Foucault, is used again for his work on bio-power and sexuality. Sexuality’s constructed elusiveness constitutes what Foucault calls the “intrinsic latency” of the new formation. And, because the logic of sexual behaviour was deemed elusive, and its practices were deemed radically private, a great deal of a population’s conditions of existence could be examined and altered to uncover, protect and manage sexuality’s workings. Sexual practices between individuals of the same gender become “perverse,” outside “true sex,” as Foucault puts it in his introduction to the hermaphrodite, Herculine Barbin’s, memoirs. Sex takes up its function as an anchor for love as legal relations between spouses change: as wives gain rights.
