Eileen helpfully pointed out that I did this whole riff on “biopower” or “bio-politics” without explaining what it was. As you may remember, the context was Mrs. Bruton’s deep identification with the imperial project of encouraging the migration of young Britons to Canada. This urge, aligning herself with the Empire’s power to manage entire populations of people, keep demographic statistics, worry over how to manage inflows and outflows of different kinds of people across borders, is a paradigmatic example of what the cultural theorist Michel Foucault calls “bio-power” or “biopolitics.”

For Foucault, this modality of power manifests in the nineteenth century in an intensification of the “disciplinary” model he traces in Discipline and Punish, his study of 18thC technologies of surveillance and incarceration. Bio-power focuses outward in scale, onto entire populations at the national and international level, and inward in intensification, aiming at the biological functions of nutrition and sexuality (e.g., birth control policy, anti-obesity efforts).

For more, check out this essay by Rachel Adams, this article from Wikipedia, and, if you want the horse’s mouth, the .pdf of the final chapter of the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, where he introduces the term for the first time, which I’ve put in our Dropbox under “general sources.”