ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that biologization is an historical phenomenon to show that 'the private, enclosed, stable body that seems to lie at the basis of modern notions of sexual and racial difference is also the product of particular, historical, cultural moments'. Over the past few centuries, biological determinism has become 'the conceptual structure that organizes social experience on the basis of shared understandings'. Science and politics are intricately intermeshed in the history of modern forms of embodied power, generating and accrediting claims about population differences that haunt individuals from cradle to grave. The chapter traces the emergence of biological determinism as an integral part of modernity's struggle to supersede theological and metaphysical ontologies. Scientific language offered a way of organizing the species altogether compatible with transformative political ideas circulating in the age of republican revolutions. The chapter also sketches the complex interplay of science and politics in the production of 'race' and 'sex' as biological categories since the 16th century.
