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Judith Butler's Theory of Gender Performativity | Definition, Examples & Analysis

Gender Performance, Gender Trouble & Queer Theory

The theory of gender performativity was introduced by feminist philosopher Judith Butler in her 1990 text Gender Trouble. For Butler, and for queer theory more broadly, gender is what you do, not who you are. Rather than viewing gender as something natural or internal, Butler roots gender in outward signs and actions. These performative acts do not express an “innate” gender but actually create gender itself; the performance of gender produces the identity it claims to reveal.

Gender is performed not through a singular act but through ritualized repetition. This repetition gives gender its illusion of stability; the repeated performance of gender in accordance with social norms (men ought to speak like this, women ought to dress like this) reproduces and reinscribes those norms, making them seem legitimate and fixed.

We are compelled to repeatedly perform gender in certain ways because societal structures reward those who perform gender “correctly” (according to a strict binary) and punish those who do not. Think of Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1989): Ariel and Erik conform to normative gender expectations, and they are rewarded with a happy ending; on the other hand, Ursula—with her deep voice, short hair, plus-sized body, and makeup inspired by the drag queen Divine—is villainized and defeated.

Performing gender “correctly” gives us a designated role in society and allows us to be recognized as a full, “real” subject. Our conscious and unconscious awareness of gender constraints means we are always performing gender to an audience, even an imagined one. 

Gender’s performativity thus produces gender while concealing its own creation. As Butler writes in Gender Trouble, 

Gender Trouble

because there is neither an ‘essence’ that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires, and because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. (1990)

Summarising Butler’s arguments in Gender Trouble

Twentieth-century feminists—like feminists today—faced a difficult task in building a political movement around “woman” as a category. Often, women seem more disparate than united. The experience of “womanhood” varies greatly based on other identities like race, nationality, and sexuality; lesbian feminists and Black feminists especially felt that the “woman” defended by twentieth-century feminism was not representative of their experiences or interests. Even women who call themselves feminists have different, even opposing, ideas about what “justice” for women looks like. 

How stable or useful is “woman” as a category? Butler begins Gender Trouble with this question, but it leads her to interrogate the concept of gender itself. Throughout the twentieth century, feminists troubled ideas of biological determinism, or the belief that differences between men and women were biologically inherent. Instead, some feminists proposed that sex (understood as the biological body) was different from gender (the cultural expectations and meanings of that sexed body). This sex/gender division aimed to emphasize that the differences between men and women largely resulted not from biology but from societal structures that could be changed, that gender was a “construct.” As Simone de Beauvoir writes in The Second Sex, “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.” 

In Gender Trouble, Butler pushes these ideas further. If gender is distinct from sex, then it needn’t follow a sex-based binary: “man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one.” Gender could be constructed in a multitude of ways.

How, then, is gender constructed? Who or what is constructing it? For Butler, there is no original constructor of gender, no innate or “real” gender that seeks expression. Instead, gender is created entirely through performance. As Butler argues, 

if gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows or produces its cultural signification, are performative, then there is no preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured; there would be no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the postulation of a true gender identity would be revealed as a regulatory fiction. (1990)

Butler cites drag as an example of gender performativity. In drag shows, men perform an exaggerated form of femininity. As an imitation and parody of gender, drag calls attention to the performativity of gender in all contexts: “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency.” Drag parodies the idea of an “original” or “normal” gender. The “original” itself is a failed copy of an “ideal” gender that no one can embody.

Although the repetition of gender constrains us, it also contains the key to resisting gender norms. Because gender is repeated and performed, not stable or innate, there is the possibility of variation, the ability to perform differently. As Butler writes, “The task is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat or, indeed, to repeat and, throughout a radical proliferation of gender, displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself.” 

This begs the question: what would it look like to perform gender outside of binary categories?


How do Bodies That Matter and Undoing Gender develop on Gender Trouble?

Though Gender Trouble focuses on gender, Butler also questions the validity of sex as a “natural” category, noting that even biological sex is already gendered. She returns to sex in Bodies That Matter and aims to reconcile the theory of performativity with the material body. Butler argues that sex is “not a simple fact or static condition of the body” but instead, like gender, “part of a regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs” through performative acts. The body appears through and is altered by norms regarding sex, gender, and sexuality.

In gendered and heterosexist cultures, the body must be sexed in order to be culturally intelligible. Take, for example, the practice of performing surgery on infants and children born “intersex” or with indeterminate or combined sexual anatomy. These surgeries seek to force bodies into binary and gendered categories. 

Binary sex, like gender, is reinforced through performative acts. In Bodies That Matter, Butler clarifies that performativity is both bodily and linguistic; she draws upon J.L. Austin’s concept of “performative utterances” or “speech acts,” instances in which speech does not merely say something but also does something—for example, saying “I do” in a wedding or pronouncing two people “man and wife.” 

As Austin writes in How to Do Things With Words, 

In these examples it seems clear that to utter the sentence (in, of course, the appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it. […] When I say, before the registrar or altar, &c, ‘I do’, I am not reporting on a marriage: I am indulging in it.

When a priest pronounces a couple married, the words change the status of the couple; when a doctor declares “it’s a girl,” the speech act inscribes gender onto the infant. This “girl” will never be able to perfectly perform an idealized normative gender. However, she is, as Butler writes,

Bodies That Matter

compelled to ‘cite’ the norm in order to qualify and remain a viable subject. Femininity is thus not the product of a choice, but the forcible citation of a norm, one whose complex historicity is indissociable from relations of discipline, regulation, punishment. Indeed, there is no ‘one’ who takes on a gender norm. On the contrary, this citation of the gender norm is necessary in order to qualify as a ‘one,’ to become viable as a ‘one,’ where subject formation is dependent on the prior operation of legitimating gender norms. (1996)

The speech act, like other performative actions, both gains its power through and can be undermined by repetition. Butler discusses how the term “queer” has changed over time, shifting from a derogatory slur to a reclaimed identity. The word retains its history, but each time it is repeated differently, it acquires new meaning.

In Undoing Gender, Butler further explores how the linked processes of sexing and gendering are required to be a viable “subject.” She discusses the double bind of losing one’s self when performing a compelled gender but losing one’s legibility when performing gender outside of cultural norms:

Undoing Gender

if I am a certain gender, will I still be regarded as part of the human? Will the ‘human’ expand to include me in its reach? If I desire in certain ways, will I be able to live? Will there be a place for my life, and will it be recognizable to the others upon whom I depend for social existence? (2004)

Responding to the “New Gender Politics” of the early 2000s, Undoing Gender addresses the tensions between feminist, queer, and trans theories and theorists and aims to account for transsexual, transgender, and intersex experiences. Butler argues that feminism must ally itself with other movements “since phobic violence against bodies is part of what joins antihomophobic, antiracist, feminist, trans, and intersex activism.” She embraces questions which disturb the feminist movement, asserting that continual questioning is itself a feminist act. 

Through her various works, Butler theorizes and deconstructs “the heterosexual matrix,” which links cultural norms of sex, gender, and sexuality. In Media, Gender and Identity, David Gauntlett neatly presents and analyzes Butler’s argument via helpful tables. Culture compels us to take sex as a biological given, which then dictates a given gender and sexual desires:



As Gauntlett writes, “Butler’s overall argument is that we should not accept that any of these follow from each other—we should shatter the imagined connections.” Sex, gender, and desire need not conform to binary structures; the matrix would need to be replaced with something like this:


Gender Performativity in Mulan: A Case Study

Gender norms affect all aspects of our lives, sometimes in ways we do not fully realize; we are surrounded by examples of gender performativity. One piece of popular media that engages with these ideas is Disney’s Mulan (Bancroft & Cook, 1998), an animated movie about a young woman who pretends to be a man in order to take her father’s place in the army and ultimately saves China. There are several instances of “cross dressing” in Mulan which, like the example of drag in Butler’s works, highlight the performativity of gender. 

Even before Mulan dresses as a man, we see her performing gender. The opening number, “Honor to Us All,” introduces us to the expectations of gender performance Mulan faces. The women sing of how girls should be “calm” and “obedient,” thin and dainty, while they dress Mulan and paint her face with makeup in preparation for a meeting with the Matchmaker. The “heterosexual matrix” is on full display: young women must perform an idealized form of femininity in order to attract men and secure good marriages. 

Mulan shows how gender norms are regulated and enforced by various societal institutions, including the family and the state. Gender performativity is presented as an obligation to one’s nation. As the women sing, “We all must serve our Emperor / Who guards us from the Huns / A man by bearing arms / A girl by bearing sons.” Failing to perform one’s gender “correctly” means dishonoring one’s country and one’s family; in the face of this punishment, women are compelled to perform a certain kind of femininity.

However, attaining this gendered ideal—becoming, as the lyrics say, a “perfect, perfect porcelain doll”—is impossible. Mulan cannot meet these exacting standards. Wiping off the mask of performed femininity represented by her makeup, she sings, “I will never pass for the perfect bride or the perfect daughter. / Can it be I’m not meant to play this part?” In singing about playing a part, Mulan explicitly identifies gender as performative.

Mulan must perform gender differently in order to “pass” as a man in the army. She dresses in “men’s” clothes, speaks in a lower register, and walks differently. Her comedic attempts to appear “manly” show the absurdity in our expectations of gendered behavior. 

Eventually, Mulan’s body “reveals” her “true” gender. When the general Li Shang sees that Mulan has breasts, he assumes, as a result of societally ingrained beliefs, that she must be a woman. Mulan is punished for her gender nonconformity; she must leave the army, as the role of soldier has been designated for men. Her “failure” to perform her gender “correctly” calls the whole gendered system into question. Mulan has become a model soldier, proving that she can perform the masculine ideal described in the song “Make a Man Out of You” as well as—and in some cases better than—the “real” men she fights alongside.

Mulan and her fellow soldiers later use expectations of gender performativity to their advantage. In order to fool the villain’s guards, the soldiers dress as women and act in an exaggeratedly feminine way. The guards buy into the performance and assume these “women” are not a threat. Though this instance of drag relies on the performativity of gender, it is not necessarily subversive; as Butler clarifies in Bodies That Matter, not all parodies challenge gender or heterosexist norms. Without the context of the result of the film, this scene would not subvert gendered assumptions; it could suggest that the disguised soldiers are a threat only because they are, in “reality,” men.

The film conforms to the heterosexual matrix in its treatment of the romance between Shang and Mulan. Though Shang interacts with Mulan as a man for most of the movie, their relationship cannot occur until Mulan has returned to her “proper” gender role; Shang can only be attracted to Mulan once she is “revealed” as a woman, the “proper” object of his desire. 


Critiques and Analysis of Butler's Theories

When Mulan laments her inability to perform gender as her family and culture want her to, she asks, “When will my reflection show who I am inside?” This sentiment speaks to some questions which critics of Butler (and Butler herself) have grappled with when addressing gender performativity. If gender is constructed, what produces one’s “internal” or psychological experience of gender, particularly when it is at odds with the gender one is expected to perform? If gender is a performance and a construct, does that mean it is not “real”?

Transphobic thinkers, including trans-exclusionary radical “feminists” (TERFs) or so-called “gender critical feminists,” have misinterpreted Butler’s theories of performativity in order to claim that the experience of gender for trans individuals is not “real” or that they could choose to perform their gender in alignment with their assigned sex. Butler has continuously and publicly argued against these ideas and the transphobic belief that only those born in certain bodies can be certain genders. As she writes in Undoing Gender, regarding trans women, “The very attribution of femininity to female bodies as if it were a natural or necessary property takes place within a normative framework in which the assignment of femininity to femaleness is one mechanism for the production of gender itself.”

Gender performativity has also been criticized for not properly accounting for bodily experience. While some of these arguments are used for transphobic ends or rely on a sexed binary, some trans theorists like Jay Prosser (author of Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality) have argued that gender performativity does not explain the bodily experiences of gender for many in the trans community, such as the feeling of gender dysphoria and the importance of gender affirming surgeries. Butler has acknowledged that her earlier writings do not adequately address trans experiences; in her later works, she discusses how transgender and transsexual experiences are pathologized and regulated through the same systems of power that demand certain gender performances.

Other thinkers, like Rosi Braidotti, have reconsidered sexual difference beyond a fixed sex binary. Finding that Butler’s theories down-play the embodied nature of the subject, Braidotti instead takes the body as her starting point. In Metamorphoses: Toward a Materialist Theory of Becoming (2002) and Posthuman Feminism (2022), Braidotti embraces the material differences of bodies; cautions against a universalizing, “gender-free,” or neutral notion of the body; and argues that bodies take shape through interactions with other bodies. Her redefinition of bodies combines materialism with an awareness of the impact of social forces:

Metamorphoses

The embodiedness of the subject is a form of body materiality, not of the natural, biological kind. I take the body as the complex interplay of highly constructed social and symbolic forces: it is not an essence, let alone a biological substance, but a play of forces, a surface of intensities, pure simulacra without originals. This ‘intensive’ redefinition of the body resituates it within a complex interplay of social and affective forces. This is also a clear move away from the psychoanalytic idea of the body as a map of semiotic inscriptions and culturally enforced codes. I see it instead as a transformer and a relay point for the flow of energies: a surface of intensities. (2002)

In Undoing Gender, Butler responds to Braidotti’s theories and finds that they raise useful questions about the material experiences of gender and desire. She writes, “Sexual difference is not a given, not a premise, not a basis on which to build a feminism; it is not that which we have already encountered and come to know; rather, as a question that prompts a feminist inquiry, it is something that cannot quite be stated, that troubles the grammar of the statement, and that remains, more or less permanently, to interrogate.” For Butler, interrogation is necessary for feminist thinking to thrive.

While challenging any claim to “innate” gender, Butler has clarified that she believes “every person should have the right to determine the legal and linguistic terms of their embodied lives” (per this interview) regardless of how they internally experience gender.


Judith Butler, Pronoun Use & Gendered Language

Butler’s theories reject a stable gender binary, inviting us to see how gender is and can be performed in a multitude of ways. These ideas have contributed to the growing movement to recognize gender experiences and identities beyond binary notions of “man” and “woman.” For example, some people use terms like genderfluid, genderqueer, gender non-conforming, and non-binary to describe themselves and their experiences of gender. The growing use of pronouns other than he/him and she/her—like they/them—is one way that people indicate an experience of gender beyond the binary. The concept of a gender spectrum, rather than binary, has become a popular way of discussing gender, but it is important to avoid envisioning this spectrum with stable end points. According to Butler’s theories, no gender is stable; no one can perform perfect masculinity and femininity, which we are trained to envision as opposites. Butler’s theories ask us to recognize our failure to perform binary gender, despite our societal compulsion to attempt it, and instead embrace a “radical proliferation of gender,” a vast array of gender expressions.


Judith Butler Quotes on Gender Performativity

“Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis; the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions — and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them; the construction ‘compels’ our belief in its necessity and naturalness.” (Gender Trouble)

“As in other ritual social dramas, the action of gender requires a performance that is repeated. This repetition is at once a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established; and it is the mundane and ritualized form of their legitimation.” (Gender Trouble)

“Gender ought not to be constructed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.” (Gender Trouble)

“If gender attributes, however, are not expressive but performative, then these attributes effectively constitute the identity that they are said to express or reveal.” (Gender Trouble)

“Genders can be neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent, neither original nor derived.” (Gender Trouble)

“The practice by which gendering occurs, the embodying of norms, is a compulsory practice, a forcible production, but not for that reason fully determining. To the extent that gender is an assignment, it is an assignment which is never quite carried out according to expectation, whose addressee never quite inhabits the ideal s/he is compelled to approximate.” (Bodies That Matter)

“If gender is a kind of doing, an incessant activity performed, in part, without one’s knowing and without one’s willing, it is not for that reason automatic or mechanical. On the contrary, it is a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint. Moreover, one does not ‘do’ one’s gender alone. One is always “doing” with or for another, even if the other is only imaginary.” (Undoing Gender) 



External Resources on Sex & Gender Theory

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvlHKNvb6rI – Who’s Afraid of Gender?, Judith Butler. A conference keynote speech that formed part of the ‘Doing Global Gender | Perspectives on Gender and Re-Globalization’ conference 2-6 May 2022, University of California, Berkeley, USA.

https://rosibraidotti.com/2019/11/21/posthuman-feminism/ – Posthuman Feminism, Rosi Braidotti. A keynote speech given at the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality, Columbia University, NYC, USA.

https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101889927/judith-butler-and-roxane-gay-on-gender-inclusive-language – a podcast featuring Judith Butler & Roxane Gay, wherein they discuss the use of gender-inclusive language.

https://www.ucd.ie/humanities/events/podcasts/2012/rosi-braidotti-feminist-theory/ – a podcast featuring Rosi Braidotti entitled Nomadic Feminist Theory in a Global Era.


Key Books on Queer Theory & Gender

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. 1st ed. Taylor and Francis, 2011.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. 1st ed. Taylor and Francis, 2011.

Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. 1st ed. Taylor and Francis, 2004.

Braidotti, Rosi. Metamorphoses. 1st ed. Wiley, 2013.

Braidotti, Rosi. Posthuman Feminism. 1st ed. Polity Press, 2021.

Prosser, Jay. Second Skins. Columbia University Press, 1998.

Gauntlett, David. Media, Gender and Identity. 2nd ed. Taylor and Francis, 2008.

Austin, John L. How to Do Things with Words. 2nd ed. Harvard Uni Press, 1975.

De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. 2nd ed. Penguin, 2015.

What is Judith Butler’s Theory of Gender Performativity?

What is Cultural Relativism?

What is Structural Inequality?

What is Critical Race Theory (CRT)?

What is Critical Disability Theory?

Queer Theory | Definitions, Examples & Analysis

Queer Theory has long been considered difficult to define. However, Jimmie Manning’s definition in The SAGE Encyclopedia of LGBTQ Studies (Goldberg, 2016) is a useful starting point. Manning states that Queer Theory is,

The SAGE Encyclopedia of LGBTQ Studies

a collective term that engages multiple, and sometimes conflicting, viewpoints about sex, gender, and sexuality. Queer theory, much like the word queer itself, is an often-contested term that is used in different ways by multiple scholars and activists. (2016)

We will return to this definition later, but if we are to understand what queer theory is, we should also define the term ‘queer’. This term, ‘queer’, itself is broad – in fact, it could be referred to as an umbrella term, a term within which multiple identities exist. In What Does Q Mean? Including queer voices in qualitative research (2012), Levi & Johnson write that “queer theorists often hesitate to define the term queer, other than to say that it refers to non-normative sexuality.” The term queer was historically used as a slur against non-heterosexual individuals. Its meaning was reclaimed in the early 1990s when the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) became known as Queer Nation. The idea was that this term- which implied being ‘not normal’- could belong to the people dehumanised by it.

Developing Understandings of Queer Theory

So if we were to imagine a ‘queer theory’, what might this look like? A theory which perhaps explains how gender and sexuality varies, and what that variation is influenced by? In Manning’s definition, he talks about multiple viewpoints being engaged under the “collective” term of Queer Theory. But if we are looking for one key text to help us make sense of this collective, where should we look?

Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble is the best place to start. If you really want to deep-dive this groundbreaking publication, our full guide to Judith Butler’s Theory of Gender Performativity is here. Gender Performativity is undoubtedly one of the most crucial concepts from Butler’s writing and helps inform our understanding of what Queer Theory is. Butler describes Gender Performativity as “the way in which the anticipation of a gendered essence produces that which it posits as outside itself” (1990). More simply, genders are not objective or universally defined. Our own expectations of what a gender ‘is’ informs how we behave, which thus creates gendered behaviour. Butler’s conception of gender ultimately argues that the experiences of being a “man” or a “woman” are neither clearly definable or applicable to the whole human population. Butler’s argument is that gender – as distinct from physical sex – is constructed through performance. 

So, how does this relate back to Queer Theory? If performance grounds the way in which we enforce or reinforce a system of gender binary, then what about ‘non-normative’ identities? Effectively, we can deduce that what is ‘normative’, if gender is socially constructed, is just what has been agreed upon as ‘normal’. Queer Theory, at its core, challenges the notion that being heterosexual and/or cisgender is normal, or the human ‘default’. 

Queer Theory is important because it equips us with the ability to critically assess wider social perspectives on topics such as gender and sexuality. It is not just about understanding how gender and sexuality affects society, but also about understanding why these ‘non-normative’ identities are stigmatised. In understanding the origins of stigma, we can address the underlying beliefs and assumptions which perpetuate said stigma. 

Another notable text which helps us understand this is Annamarie Jagose’s Queer Theory: An Introduction (1996). In the chapter Theorising Same-Sex Desire, Jagose writes,

Queer Theory: An Introduction

Heterosexuality, after all, has long maintained its claim to be a natural, pure, and unproblematic state which requires no explanation. Indeed, in so far as many attempts to ‘explain’ homosexuality are grounded conceptually on heterosexuality, there is a sense in which heterosexuality is assumed to be a neutral or unmarked form of sexuality per se. (1996)

What is useful here is that Jagose articulates a tacit assumption that heterosexuality is both natural, normal and what is often expected of people. When one group of individuals are tacitly assumed to represent what is normal, individuals outside of that group will be considered inherently abnormal. 

Let’s consider how the subject of what is natural manifests in social discourse around gender and sexuality. In Vincent & Howell’s (2014) ‘Unnatural’, ‘un-African’and ‘ungodly’: Homophobic discourse in democratic South Africa, the researchers explain how describing homosexual relationships as unnatural was inherently tied to “children and childrearing and which is associated with the non-procreational character of same-sex unions.” Because, as we saw in Jagose’s writing, heterosexuality is the presumed-neutral of sexualities, this means that activities such as child-rearing are considered a baseline for a normal relationship. What occurs in a heterosexual relationship is less likely to be challenged and scrutinized. Relationships, of course, develop for many reasons other than child-rearing; kinship, companionship, and mutual support (of emotional or even financial natures). To define heterosexuality as natural because procreation is possible is to define everything else as unnatural – particularly homosexual relationships. 

When we believe that gender and sexuality are innate and unchanging facets of the self, it allows us to believe that what is common is normal, and what is normal is natural. When we believe that gender and sexuality are concepts which we have no influence in defining, individuals who exist outside the norm are treated at best, as anomalous. At worst, these individuals can be seen as a threat or even a perversion of nature. This natural/unnatural argument is harmful to gender and sexuality diverse individuals, but it also doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. This is preciely why Queer Theory is so valuable; because it allows us to challenge how the terms ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ are defined socially. 

As such, Queer Theory explains the mechanisms underpinning how identities do (or do not) create space for one another within social systems and what the consequences of those systems can be. As a result, the application of Queer Theory can (and does) span across fields such as Psychology, Anthropology, Economics and many broader Human Sciences. 

How does Queer Theory relate to other social theories?

Queer Theory is in many ways linked to Critical Race Theory. One of the key tenets of Critical Race Theory is that race is socially constructed; it is based on real and tangible factors but that what it means in society has been designed by people. We can easily see parallels here between Queer Theory’s standpoint on gender and Critical Race Theory’s standpoint on race. Both theories challenge ideas about what is natural, normal and innate to human identities- and confront systems of power which harm or marginalise people based on these ideas. 

Facets of our identity such as race, gender and sexuality can also intersect and combine- creating unique lived experiences that influence how we are treated in wider society. This is the premise of Intersectional Feminist Theory, which originated from legal scholarship on the subject of Black women’s oppression. Intersectional Feminist Theory- often referred to as intersectionality- argues that when one’s race, gender, sexuality or other characteristics ‘intersect’, people can experience social privileges or struggles based on how those specific identities are valued in society. This ties into what Queer Theory teaches us about systems of power related to gender and sexuality, and many Intersectional Feminist theorists agree with the notion of gender as a social construct.

An example of Queer Theory in contemporary society 

In understanding Queer Theory, it may be useful to look at how it has been applied to a contemporary social issue. In Dude, You’re a Fag (2011), American Sociologist CJ Pascoe conducted ethnographic research at a high school in the US- with the research designed to observe and investigate dynamics between the adolescent students. What emerged was a system of students policing one another’s behaviours based on the gender and sexuality related components perceived in their behaviour. 

The name of the book comes from how regularly Pascoe witnessed male students refer to one another as “fags”- and very often this was a response to actions unrelated to sexuality. Pascoe found that boys referred to each other as fags for things like personal hygiene, caring about one’s appearance and expressing emotion. Race was intersectionally tied to this, as Pascoe found that Black male students didn’t use the slur of ‘fag’ to police the expression of their peers in the same way- and that this shaming of fellow students for perceived effeminate behaviour was most common amongst White male students. 

Pascoe’s ethnography presents many examples of gender being tied to sexuality. In the chapter titled Look at my Masculinity! Girls who Act like Boys, Pascoe shares an example of a student connecting these two concepts together,

Dude, You're a Fag

Much as they did with boys, youth at River High associated girls’ gender non-normativity with same-sex desire. When I explained to them that I was “writing a chapter on girls who do guy things,” Sarah (the aforementioned cheerleader) asked, “Oh, you mean lesbians?”. (2011)

We can see here what we have previously discussed regarding queer theory and how gender is socially constructed. In this scenario, the student demonstrates their belief that gender is, at least in part, contingent on who you are attracted to. It shows an association of sexuality, not physical sex, with gender and gendered roles. This interaction is indicative of normalised perceptions of male (and often masculine) behaviour being innately heterosexual. It is also indicative of how women being attracted to other women is considered subversive and potentially un-feminine as a consequence. Based on Sarah’s convictions in this passage, we can assume that she perceives same-gender attraction as being outside of what is ‘normal’ for women and what is expected when performing womanhood. 

In Pascoe’s ethnography we can begin to understand how, socially, sexuality is often tied to gender. Behaving in ways deemed not masculine enough was grounds for a boy to have his sexuality questioned; likely because of how social norms tie masculinity to heterosexuality. However, this publication also allows us to understand what Butler was describing in Gender Trouble. It conveys how gender is subjective to how we perform it, and expect it to be performed, as well as how social rules develop to determine what is acceptable behaviour for different gendered groups. Of these rules, Pascoe states,

Studying gender transgressions in adolescence provides empirical evidence to bolster and extend some of the claims of queer theory. (2011)

Queer Theory comprises many ideas and convictions but, crucially, it is about norms and “transgressions”, as Pascoe observes. Queer Theory allows us to better understand what is deemed acceptable and taboo in society, how those perceptions around gender and sexuality develop and how they can, in theory, be challenged and deconstructed.

Significant writers and theorists in the field of Queer Theory

Queer theory has often been best articulated through the work of queer-identifying scholars; Jack Halberstam is a prime example of this. Halberstam has written notably on transgender conceptualisations of the self and also writes on how queerness encourages a deconstruction of masculinity and femininity- as evidenced in his book Female Masculinity. Halberstam is one of the most successful queer theorists if you are looking for more specific writing on masculinity and transmasculinities. If we want to understand the origins of Queer Theory, however, the work of scholars such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Eve Sedgwick is essential. The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader and Sedgwick’s Performativity and Performance both allow readers to bridge the gap between modern conceptions of Queer Theory and this theory’s deep philosophical roots. Queer Theory was, ultimately, the convergence of concepts and ideas which emerged in the work of philosophers across the 19th and 20th Century. Anzaldúa and Sedgwick are two of the best examples of the scholars who made that convergence conceivable and material. 

Queer Theory can come across as an intimidating topic- but its broadness is its greatest strength. Queer Theory provides us with the intellectual toolkit to challenge preconceived notions we might carry about the world around us. Its use as a framework for critical thought around the subject of gender & sexuality is undeniable and has many real-world applications- as is evidenced in Pascoe’s study. Through this theory that we can begin to understand systems of power that influence how people are assigned value based on their gender or sexual orientation. Hopefully, it can also be used to confront these structures of inequality and allow us to even conceptualise more egalitarian and inclusive approaches to how we understand what is ‘queer’.  

Further Queer Theory Resources & Reading on Perlego

Gender, Sexuality & Subjectivity – Duane Rousselle

Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing – Donna McCormack

Deleuze and Queer Theory – Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr

Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble. Routledge.

Goldberg, A. E. (Ed.). (2016). The SAGE Encyclopedia of LGBTQ studies. SAGE publications.

Jagose, A. (1996). Queer Theory: An Introduction. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

Levy, D. L., & Johnson, C. W. (2012). What does the Q mean? Including queer voices in qualitative research. Qualitative Social Work, 11(2), 130-140.

Pascoe, C. (2011). Dude, You’re a Fag (1st ed.). University of California Press.

Vincent, L., & Howell, S. (2014). ‘Unnatural’, ‘un-African’ and ‘ungodly’: Homophobic discourse in democratic South Africa. Sexualities, 17(4), 472-483.

What is Necropolitics?

What is Critical Theory?

What is Materialism?

What is New Materialism?

What is Posthumanism?

What is Structuralism?

What is Poststructuralism?

What is Mass Incarceration?

What is Political Ecology?

What is Biopower & Biopolitics? (Foucault) | Definitions, Examples & Analysis

Definitions and origins: Foucault's types of power 

Biopower and biopolitics, terms associated with Michel Foucault, describe the political regulation of life processes. Foucault writes in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1976, [1990]) that biopower employs “numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations” by entangling itself with biological processes and cultivating life deemed socially useful. Biopolitics can be defined as “politics that deals with life.” However, this feels overly simplistic or even redundant. Doesn’t all politics deal with life? In Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction (2011), Thomas Lemke investigates how the relationship between life and politics has been historically understood in two ways — life as the basis of politics and life as the object of politics — and presents Foucault’s ideas as an explicit break with these traditions (Lemke, 2011). Foucault first mentions biopolitics in a 1974 essay, and he most systematically outlines the theory in his lectures at the Collège de France from 1975 to 1978 and in The History of Sexuality. In these works, Foucault articulates a new understanding of the relationship between life and politics that continues to inform critical theory today.

Some scholars use the terms “biopower” and “biopolitics” interchangeably, while others draw a distinction between them. While Lemke argues that Foucault does not differentiate these terms, Catherine Mill disagrees. In Biopolitics (2017), Mills writes,

Biopolitics

The more general of these was ‘biopower’, which he argued encompassed both a disciplinary power focused on the individual body, and ‘biopolitics’, which focused on the new political subject of the population. [...]  However, in contemporary debates the term ‘biopower’ has largely been abandoned, and ‘biopolitics’ is taken as a more general term that means both the state and non-state (or quasi-state) management of life.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri draw a different distinction between biopower and biopolitics in their expansion upon Foucault’s theories. For these thinkers, biopower is imposed from above whereas biopolitics emerges from within society itself, shaping labor and social relationships. We explore Hardt and Negri’s theories below (see “Development of biopower/biopolitics since Foucault”). 

Foucault theorizes three kinds of power: sovereign power, disciplinary power, and biopower (see our power/knowledge study guide for more on Foucault’s theories). In his 1977–78 course, Security, Territory, Population (2007), Foucault explores the differences between these kinds of power in relation to how they punish violations of legal prohibitions like “you must not kill, you must not steal.”

Under sovereign power, a violator of these prohibitions would be punished — executed, flogged, exiled, fined. After disciplinary power emerged in the eighteenth century, however, power became not only invested in the violator’s momentary punishment but also in what provoked their crime and whether they would recidivate. Foucault explains,

Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College De France, 1977 - 78

now everything is framed by, on the one hand, a series of supervisions, checks, inspections, and varied controls that, even before the thief has stolen, make it possible to identify whether or not he is going to steal, and so on. And then, on the other hand, at the other end, punishment will not just be the spectacular, definitive moment of the hanging, fine, or banishment, but a practice like incarceration with a series of exercises and a work of transformation on the guilty person in the form of what we call penitentiary techniques: obligatory work, moralization, correction, and so forth. (2007)

In other words, disciplinary power does not stop at responding to crime in the moment: it employs surveillance to predict behavior and disciplinary processes to correct, not the crime, but the individual who committed it.

Finally, with fully developed biopolitics, power targets crime in the population, making generalizations about types of criminals, tracking crime rates across demographic groups, and investigating the cost of crime to society and to the state. Biopower ultimately prioritizes “how to keep a type of criminality, theft for instance, within socially and economically acceptable limits and around an average that will be considered as optimal for a given social functioning” (Foucault, 2007). While disciplinary power and biopower often employ the same tactics, the focus shifts from discipline of the individual to biopolitical control of the population. 

Foucault sometimes describes disciplinary power and biopower as distinct (though overlapping) types of power; other times, disciplinary power appears to be one of “two basic forms” of biopower (Foucault, 1990). Disciplinary power treats the body as a complex machine, seeking to discipline, optimize, and integrate the body into “systems of efficient and economic controls” through an “anatomo-politics of the human body” (Foucault, 1990). Disciplinary power tends to function through institutions, employing tactics like incarceration and surveillance to target individuals. Biopower, on the other hand, focuses on the “species body” and biological processes — “propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity” — through “a biopolitics of the population,” often functioning through the state (Foucault, 1990).

Individuals and populations are necessarily linked, and the state is often directly involved in institutions (i.e., the army, the school.). The precise relationship between disciplinary power and biopower is thus difficult to disentangle. Biopolitics aims to increase and optimize life deemed useful, affecting both individual bodies and the larger body politic.

According to Foucault, before the emergence of biopolitics, society was governed by sovereign power. The sovereign ruled through the “right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself” (Foucault, 1990). Foucault writes that the “sovereign exercised his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing” (1990).

While sovereign power could “take life or let live,” biopower could “foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (Foucault, 1990). As Simona Rentea writes, biopolitics “takes death as its limit” and, through the vital power of biopolitics, “the order of sovereignty is radically transformed”:

The Routledge Handbook of Biopolitics

Death is the point where life escapes its capture while at the same time it becomes power’s most secret and shameful aspect as the positive economy of biopolitics focused on fostering life and its productive capacities is, at the same time, unafraid of deploying its more ‘lethal’ weapons. (2016)

While sovereign power could only seize life, biopower could permeate all aspects of life. This constitutive power is harder to recognize than deductive power but no less lethal. As Rentea explains,

Death and massacres do not disappear but become vital. They are no longer fought in the name of the sovereign’s right to defend himself but are increasingly instrumentalised in the service of the survival of the species. (2016)

Biopower works to help desirable populations flourish, while other populations are construed as threats to the health of the societal body. Biopower can kill in the name of life. We can now see a connection between biopolitics and eugenics, but questions of who is encouraged to reproduce versus allowed to die touch on a variety of topics — responses to pandemics, policies regarding asylum seekers, regulations on abortion, directives of patients regarding life-prolonging measures, and more.

Foucault identifies sex as a primary site of biopower’s influence, as reproduction involves both individual anatomo-politics and population-driven biopolitics. Foucault argues that under sovereign power, identity and power were associated with blood: the threat of bloodshed, the meaning of risking one’s blood, the influence of one’s bloodline: “blood was a reality with a symbolic function” (Foucault, 1990). Under biopower, we shift from a “society of blood” to a “society of ‘sex,’ or rather a society ‘with a sexuality’” (Foucault, 1990). Foucault locates power as operating through sexuality; sexual discourses surround us and inform many of our modern political struggles, and our identities have become tied to our sexual practices and desires.

Foucault also identifies a “very profound transformation” of the “mechanisms of power” employed by sovereign power versus biopower. Rather than a power to seize, biopower is,

working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them. (Foucault, 1990)

This important change results in a shift from a reliance on external laws to a reliance on internalized norms. As Chloe Taylor argues,

The Routledge Guidebook to Foucault's The History of Sexuality

Biopolitics and disciplinary power are able to access the body because they function through norms rather than laws. (2016)

Norms are maintained by the society itself, and they stretch beyond the law, affecting our everyday habits and sense of self. We can see these norms at work in everything, from habitually brushing our teeth to “correcting” gendered behavior deemed “atypical” in children.

Over the course of Foucault’s works, biopolitics develops three key meanings:

Biopolitics describes a modern practice of power, resulting from the historical transformation of sovereign power into biopower.

Biopolitics also indicates a shift from the “political-military discourse” of sovereign power to a “racist-biological” one (Lemke, 2011). According to Foucault, biopower’s division of people into those who must live and those who must die is racism in a fundamental sense.

Biopolitics is a particular product of liberalism, an idea which Foucault explores in depth in his lectures, The Birth of Biopolitics (1978–79).

The dual power of biopolitics — to foster life and to let die — has produced a differentiation in terms. Foucault sometimes uses “thanatopolitics” to describe the power over death (as opposed to biopolitics, the power over life). 

Building on these ideas, Achille Mbembe coined the term “necropolitics” in his study of who power deems must die. Mbembe argues that bipower alone is insufficient to describe “contemporary forms of subjugating life to the power of death.” Mbembe writes, 

Necropolitics

I have put forward the notion of necropolitics, or necropower, to account for the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximally destroying persons and creating death-worlds, that is, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead. (2019)

The concepts of death-worlds (spaces made unlivable) and the living dead (populations treated as socially dead) are core to necropolitical theory. Necropolitics can aid analysis of a range of topics. For example, Necropolitics (2015) focuses on practices of mass graves and exhumations across the world, while R. Guy Emerson examines violence and “living death” in Mexico in Necropolitics (2019). Queer Necropolitics(2014) examines extreme and everyday examples of how queer people around the world are forced to, or allowed to, die.

Development of biopower/biopolitics since Foucault

Since Foucault, scholars have aimed to clarify, respond to, and reformulate his theories of biopolitics. Here are some major contemporary thinkers who have produced influential scholarship on biopolitics.

Giorgio Agamben’s theory of biopolitics, most clearly articulated in Homo Sacer (1998), views biopolitics not as a replacement of sovereign power but instead as core to it. In other words, Agamben does not identify a complete change in how power functions but rather a radicalization of what was already there.

Agamben focuses on the difference between biological and political life. Tracing biopolitics back to antiquity, Agamben explores the figure of the “homo sacer,” the sacred man, who could be killed without punishment. Here, Agamben locates a distinction between bare life (zoē), common to all living beings, and political life (bios) — the difference between biological and legal existence. The homo sacer possesses bare life but no political life, and Agamben follows this figure banned from political existence throughout history, from Roman exiles to those held in Nazi concentration camps.

Agamben argues that this separation between bare life and political life is a core biopolitical paradigm for democracy and totalitarianism alike. Someone is always excluded from political life. Agamben declares the camp the “hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity,” as it marks the border between bare life and political existence that all forms of modern government police (1998). 

While Agamben sees a consistency in this idea since the ancient world, he does notice a shift in our modern biopolitics. He writes,

Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

the realm of bare life—which is originally situated at the margins of the political order—gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoē, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction. (Agamben, 1998)

Bare life has become the subject and object of political order. Agamden describes the double-sided nature of modern biopolitics:

the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals’ lives within the state order, thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves. (1998)

According to Agamben, rights that seem in the realm of bare life have, in our modern world, become politically inscribed. Lemke rearticulates Agamben’s idea, writing that biopolitics “focuses on living beings rather than on legal subjects—or, to be more precise, it deals with legal subjects that are at the same time living beings” (2011). For Agamben, this treatment of legal subjects as living beings has tended toward a merging of these two terms. Life is increasingly legally described and determined.

Rather than viewing biopolitics as the paradigm of a history leading toward Nazi concentration camps, literary theorist Michael Hardt and philosopher Antonio Negri provide a different attempt at updating biopolitics. In Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004), Hardt and Negri build on Marxist traditions, Italian workers’ movements, and poststructural critiques of identity and subjectivity to propose a vision of biopolitics as a new stage of capitalism in which the borders of economics and politics, production and reproduction, disappear.

Hardt and Negri argue that, over the course of the twentieth century, 

Empire

the role of industrial factory labor has been reduced and priority given instead to communicative, cooperative, and affective labor [“immaterial labor”]. In the postmodernization of the global economy, the creation of wealth tends ever more toward what we will call biopolitical production, the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another. (2000)

Modern biopolitical production is concerned with all forms of social and bare life — language, culture, subjectivity, relationships: “There is nothing, no ‘naked life,’ no external standpoint, that can be posed outside this field permeated by money; nothing escapes money “(Hardt and Negri, 2000).

Hardt and Negri make another significant contribution to biopolitical theory by accounting for the possibility of affirmative biopolitics, or biopolitical resistance. While there is a form of biopower (biopotere) that is imposed by the Empire, there is also biopolitical potential (biopotenza) held by the multitude, or the society itself. 

Roberto Esposito offered another new way of understanding biopolitics. In Immunitas (2002), and Bíos (2004), Esposito proposes the “immunitary paradigm,” a self-defensive logic embedded into social and political systems. Employing the medical understanding of immunization, Esposito argues that threats to our political or social communities are actually incorporated within them in tolerable ways, inoculating against this external enemy. The immunitary paradigm “reproduces in a controlled form exactly what it is meant to protect us from. [...] The body defeats a poison not by expelling it outside the organism, but by making it somehow part of the body” (Esposito, 2002, [2017]). Esposito continues,

Immunitas

For life to remain as such, it must submit itself to an alien force that, if not entirely hostile, at least inhibits its development. It must incorporate a fragment of the nothingness that it seeks to prevent, simply by deferring it. [...] it can prolong life, but only by continuously giving it a taste of death. (2002, [2017])

Hardt, Negri, and Esposito all acknowledge the potential of affirmative biopolitics and biopolitical resistance. Lauri Siisiäinen dedicates her book Foucault, Biopolitics and Resistance (2018) to these possibilities. Siisiäinen describes resistant biopolitics as

Foucault, Biopolitics and Resistance

an idea of politics of life, of living multitude of forces, in which life is no longer the object of political practices that control and appropriate it, but generates their peculiar subject. Such affirmative politics of life diverges from, opposes and clashes with the biopower that captures and uses the forces and capacities of life at the level of both individual subjects and populations, especially by turning them into productive resources available for capitalist exploitation. (2018)

Siisiäinen describes techniques of “immunization” (building on Esposito’s paradigm) and of aesthetics and sensuality that reimagine aspects of biopolitics in defiance of biopower’s efforts of subjugation. As scholars continue to reimagine Foucault’s theories, and the need to envision methods of resistance becomes increasingly urgent, affirmative biopolitics may prove a fascinating and fruitful area of inquiry.

While the entanglement of politics and life seems like a simple paradigm, the meaning of biopolitics continues to shift across scholarly texts. The questions that biopolitics and biopower raise have proven useful to scholars researching a variety of topics. 

Scholars approach various contemporary issues through the lens of biopolitics — water scarcity, the war on terror, child migration — while historians and political theorists examine the past through present theories; for example, see Sergei Prozorov’s The Biopolitics of Stalinism (2016), Matthew Newsom Kerr’s Contagion, Isolation, and Biopolitics in Victorian London (2017), and Kimberly Mair’s The Biopolitics of Care in Second World War Britain (2022).  

Biopolitical readings of literature and film have increased in recent years, addressing topics from The Biopolitics of Gender in Science Fiction (Cox-Palmer-White, 2021) to muscled men in cinema (Rushing, Descended from Hercules, 2016). Arne De Boever’s Narrative Care (2013) offers a close reading of several contemporary narratives of care through the lens of biopolitics. 

Researchers focusing on the posthuman and nonhuman animals expand biopower and biopolitics past Foucault’s original theories to address power dynamics affecting more than human life. In Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human (2020), Joseph Pugliese uses biopolitics to examine the ecological effects of human warfare, highlighting the nonhuman victims of colonialism entangled with and subject to the same violent biopolitical regimes as humans. In Animacies (2012), Mel Y. Chen combines applications of biopolitics to queerness, race, and nonhuman creatures to formulate a theory of animacy, exploring “how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, deathly, or otherwise ‘wrong’ animates cultural life in important ways.”

While the meanings and applications of biopower and biopolitics continue to shift, the core interest in how power becomes entangled with our lives at basic biological moments, like birth and death, is an important one. Biopolitics asks us to consider: whose lives are encouraged and whose are deemed expendable? 

Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death (2011) edited by Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse

Foucault: A Critical Introduction (2013) by Lois McNay

Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political, and Performative Strategies (2015) edited by 

The Omnibus Homo Sacer (2017) by Giorgio Agamben

Roberto Esposito: Biopolitics and Philosophy (2018) edited by Inna Viriasova, Antonio Calcagno

Arendt, Natality and Biopolitics: Toward Democratic Plurality and Reproductive Justice (2018) by Rosalyn Diprose and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek

Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by D. Heller-Roazen. Stanford University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/745251/homo-sacer-sovereign-power-and-bare-life-pdf 

Boever, A. D. (2013) Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel. Bloomsbury Publishing. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/818124/narrative-care-biopolitics-and-the-novel-pdf 

Chen, M. (2012) Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Duke University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1457881/animacies-biopolitics-racial-mattering-and-queer-affect-pdf

Cox-Palmer-White, E. (2021) The Biopolitics of Gender in Science Fiction: Feminism and Female Machines. Routledge. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2095928/the-biopolitics-of-gender-in-science-fiction-feminism-and-female-machines-pdf 

Emerson, R. G. (2019) Necropolitics: Living Death in Mexico. Palgrave Macmillan. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3492066/necropolitics-living-death-in-mexico-pdf

Esposito, R. (2008) Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Translated by T. C. Campbell. University of Minnesota Press.

Esposito, R. (2017) Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life. Translated by Z. Hanafi. Polity Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1536578/immunitas-the-protection-and-negation-of-life-pdf 

Ferrándiz, F. and Robben, A. (eds.) (2015) Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights. University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/733028/necropolitics-mass-graves-and-exhumations-in-the-age-of-human-rights-pdf 

Foucault, M. (2007) Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78. Translated by G. Burchell. Palgrave Macmillan UK. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3502885/security-territory-population-lectures-at-the-college-de-france-1977-78-pdf 

Foucault, M. (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979. Translated by G. Burchell. Palgrave Macmillan UK. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3503296/the-birth-of-biopolitics-lectures-at-the-collge-de-france-19781979-pdf 

Foucault, M. (1990) The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated by R. Hurley. Vintage Books.

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