Racial states - gendered nations On biopower, race, and sex

This chapter critically engages with Michel Foucault’s biopower analytic as an apt conceptual framework to account for the endurance of race and racism and their functioning within modern states. Moreover, the chapter revisits this biopower analytic in terms of modern sex and sexuality, which has been undertheorized in the frame of the biopower thesis, and in terms of sexual differentiation, which remains largely unthought by Foucault. Sex, sexuality, and sexual differentiation, as recent scholarship has shown, not only established hegemonic notions of femininity and masculinity, but were also crafted in terms of the production of race difference.


This chapter deals with Michel Foucault’s biopower analytic as an apt conceptual framework to account for the endurance of race and racism and their functioning within modern states. The polyvalent mobility of racism highlights its capacity to draw from old racial vocabularies while aligning its arguments with contemporary political claims. The conceptualization of the state entails a collective body that should manage life, “racism is intrinsic to the nature of all modern, normalizing states and their biopolitical technologies”. Racism can be a narrative of state power, but also a counter-narrative opposing the state. In the words of Foucault, racism justifies the death-function in the economy of biopower by appealing to the principle that the death of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is a member of a race or a population, insofar as one is an element in a unitary living plurality.