Biopolitics – Nash Wickremeratne
Biopolitics, a term popularized by French philosopher Michel Foucault, describes how political power operates through the management of biological life. The concept asserts that governments regulate their populations through a variety of means like public health, education, and economic policies. This regulation is not about controlling territory, but rather managing people, such as their health, their customs, their habits, and even their existence. For example, there are undertones of biopolitics regarding sexuality due to certain norms about what is deemed societally acceptable and what is not. Notions around sexuality can always be changed or controlled on a larger scale based on the current biopolitical thought. As a result, people in the LGBTQ+ community who don’t fit into the ideal standard are often deemed to be less worthy. Queer time challenges these ideas because it involves the consideration of the temporalities and lives of individuals who live outside the social norm.
Queer time falls under the realm of chronobiopolitics, a subset of biopolitics, which refers to how politics is used to influence the linear production of life as well as synchronize individual humans with each other under a larger temporal structure. It recognizes the nature of time as a key factor in the exercise of political power and the regulation of biological life, for enforcing policies related to birth control and family planning. Institutions deliberately shape work schedules and societal expectations about the timing of life events in order to serve certain economic or political agendas. Reproduction, health, and aging are all examples of biological events purposefully set to be at a certain period in life.
References:
Freeman, Elizabeth. Beside You in Time: Sense Methods & Queer Sociabilities in the American 19th Century. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. Print.
Samuels, Ellen, and Elizabeth Freeman. Crip Temporalities. Duke University Press, 2021.
“Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time: Disability Studies Quarterly.” Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time | Disability Studies Quarterly, dsq-sds.org/index.php/dsq/article/view/5824/4684. Accessed 28 Feb. 2024.
