Biopower

Biopower (or biopouvoir in French) is a term which relates to the practice of modern nation states and their regulation of their subjects through "an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations". It was coined by French social theorist Michel Foucault. Foucault first used the term in his lecture courses at the Collège de France, and the term first appeared in print in The Will to Knowledge, Foucault's first volume of The History of Sexuality. In Foucault's work, it has been used to refer to practices of public health, regulation of heredity, and risk regulation, among many other regulatory mechanisms often linked less directly with literal physical health. It is closely related to a term he uses much less frequently, but which subsequent thinkers have taken up independently, biopolitics, which aligns more closely with the examination of the strategies and mechanisms through which human life processes are managed under regimes of authority over knowledge, power, and the processes of subjectivation.