To be completely honest, I had never heard of the terms biopower or biopolitics in my life, until reading Michael Foucault and your class. It is something that grabbed my attention specifically, and as I get older it gets easier to recognize how and why the government tries to control us. The cool thing about sociology is that it changes the way you think about everything, so before I probably wouldn’t of been able to comprehend some of the points Foucault raises. This paper is mainly going to reflect what I have learned about biopower, and asks questions in some places I am confused about.
Correct me if I am wrong, but “biopower” is basically just power over life? So would that make biopolitics state control over the functions of life? For Foucault, it is specifically the power of a biopolitics to control the life of a specific population, and that we know holds true. I was trying to come up with an example of biopolitics and what came to mind was the everlasting battle in the U.S. over women’s reproductive rights (abortion, birth control), while the control over women’s bodies is biopower. When it comes down to it, for me that just seems a bit crazy. This brings me back to when I said I would never have thought like this when I was younger. You grow up hearing about abortion, thinking you know what the government is trying to do, yet you come to learn that they ultimately have the control over what they can and cant do with their bodies, and that needs to change.
Another interesting thing I picked up from Foucault was that when death, starvation, and plague were declining, the governments had to find another way to control us, producing “docile bodies” as Foucault puts it. The new wave of technology from what I’ve learned could be another way for the state to control us, which is then where biopower and biopolitics come into effect. Foucault even said it has been around after the medieval period and on, and that’s correct. We talked in class a little the use of people of color as subjects in medical experimentation, and that is what came to my mind when thinking about this. I believe it was the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment where they gave some black subjects the disease, and some not, and they did not tell those who were on it if they were or if they were not. In reality, that is so messed up, and would not be justified in today’s society.
This was really me spilling out what I have picked up from Foucault and some of our classes specific to the subject matter. I believe that if everyone in the world were forced to attend a sociology class, their eyes would all be opened. I would be any amount of money on that. Foucault is someone who I can see myself reading again, and more about. He was easy to read, and brought ideas into my head that I don’t know if I’d ever think about otherwise. I feel the same about all of my sociology courses as well. Definitely excited to see what the future of this class will bring.
