Introduction

Abstract

At its most literal, biopolitics is the merger of life with politics. Though the term biopolitics dates to the early decades of the twentieth century, it was only in the 1970s in the work of Michel Foucault that the idea of biopolitics, or “biopower” as he often described it, came to be understood as a fundamental and constitutive aspect of governance. Foucault defined biopower as the “explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations,”¹ as well as the set of mechanisms through which “the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy.”² This refers not just to the power of life and death possessed by absolute monarchs in the premodern period, but also to the eventual control by even modern states and liberal democracies over how life within society would be lived and experienced.