This chapter explores Michel Foucault’s impact on the history of sexuality by emphasizing the disparate and evolving nature of his work and its often-controversial influence on the history of sexuality as a field. The essay begins by summarizing the arguments of the four volumes of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, while recalling the project’s turbulent history. The first volume maintained that sexuality’s history in the West was characterized by an “incitement to discourse” (rather than repression) which sealed the “Faustian pact” between sexuality and the pursuit of truth, while also drawing sexuality into power relations. Yet Foucault’s interest in early Christian sexual practices led him to reorient his project towards an exploration of classical antiquity and the role played by sexuality in practices of subjectivity. The essay’s second part examines how historians of sexuality have drawn on Foucault’s insights, focusing on the divergences between historians influenced by Foucault’s first volume (dealing with knowledge and power) and those inspired by the latter volumes (prioritizing subjectivity). After examining Foucault’s impact on feminism and queer theory, the essay concludes by noting that many historians of sexuality have made productive use of Foucault’s work without concurring with his philosophical conclusions.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopian fiction dramatizes her reform agenda, which turned on redressing an “unnatural” division back in human history that resulted in the excessively feminine women and humanized men who defined the norm in her own day. Her 1915 novel Herland challenges by flipping traditional gender hierarchies and roles even as it retains while naturalizing other forms of privileged status. Throughout her career, Gilman grounded her politics in the domain of biological existence, initially endorsing the view that natural laws and processes left unimpeded would inevitably work to facilitate the progressively meliorative course of evolution. But the more she became convinced that humans had deviated from this course, the more ardently she advocated for an interventionist, biopolitical approach. By the time she wrote Herland, she was diagnosing a nation’s “health and vitality” based on the extent of degeneracy and impurity she detected in the social body under examination and prescribing drastic cures as needed. Herland thus reveals the author’s conservative tendencies; these increased as she aged and soured on the prospect of sweeping social reform, but they had been there all along, even in her seemingly radical theories of gender.

Chapter 1 outlines the growth of military writing in Britain during the Romantic period. It does so by situating this growth in relation to the extensive expansion of print of the late eighteenth century, in particular the expansion of periodical writing. Seeking to develop an intellectual culture out of the increasingly daily experience of wartime, the military journals played a foundational role in the formation of a new kind of deep but narrow field of military disciplinary knowledge. The appearance of military journals reflects how knowledge in this era was undergoing what Michel Foucault terms a process of ‘disciplinarization’, as the localised and fragmentary forms of earlier technical knowledges were variously disqualified or else centralised, normalised and hierarchicised into a set of modern disciplinary fields that formed the basis of modern science. This chapter also considers, however, how this disciplinarization of military knowledge gave rise to counter-histories of war’s sublime shock and brute force. Addressing the subjective side of disciplinarity, the formation of self-writing and what Ian Hacking has theorised as memoro-politics, this chapter concludes by placing literature and science as twinned elements forming the disciplinary knowledge of war.

This chapter situates the work of the German writer W. G. Sebald within Foucault’s paradigm of biopolitical war, which is torn between a concern with State racism and a concern with extinction. Sebald’s work is often considered in relation to World War II and the Holocaust, in other words, in relation to State racism. The chapter seeks to shift this frame of reference toward the Cold War and the reality of Mutually Assured Destruction, which are important concerns in Sebald’s oeuvre as well. This invites us to consider Sebald as an author engaged not only with State racism but also with what Foucault calls “the atomic situation.” Specifically, the chapter considers the use of lists in Sebald’s work not only as a memorial effort in response to the destruction of World War II but also as an effort to record all of life in anticipation of its disappearance. Finally, it shows that such a use of the list exceeds Sebald’s fiction and can be found in a range of related contemporary fiction and theory. Today, in the Anthropocene, the biopolitical war exceeds the issue of State racism and includes that of extinction, human and otherwise – including the extinction of literature itself.

Chapter 4 discusses various cultural constructions of physical difference: racialised phenotype, supposed medical predisposition or resistance to specific diseases and climes, and concepts of filthiness and hygiene. The eighteenth-century Navy was embedded into the structural racism of the Atlantic world and British empire, and many seamen suffered from this. Yet, unlike other institutions, it still rarely used ‘race’ as a systematic label to recruit, classify, or sift its workforce. Seamen were occasionally deployed according to climatic theories of national character and racialised constructions of disease and immunity. However, many naval surgeons still saw immunity as acquired rather than innate, and thus modifiable and dependent on a man’s most recent deployment, rather than intrinsic to ‘race’. Similarly, prejudice surrounding the cleanliness and attitudes of some groups of ‘foreigners’ was linked more to the administrative structures of foreign countries and navies than to essentialist understandings of the individuals themselves. Therefore, in the eyes of many officers, virtually any able man could be absorbed, reformed, and put to use by British naval discipline. This did not mitigate the violence and discrimination of everyday racism, but it highlights the somewhat levelling attitude of an administration bent on maximising its efficient exploitation of manpower.

According to ancient Hebrew tradition, human beings are soil that is divinely animated. This suggests that humanity cannot thrive apart from the earth that inspires and nurtures its life. Recent discoveries in soil science and human physiology indicate that the necessity and intimacy of humanity’s attachments to soil are greater than we might suppose. People are “rooted” beings. This chapter explores what the lives of plants have to teach us about the character of this rootedness, and thus argues that human life is not only animal but also plant in its nature. This is not a reduction of humans to plants but an opening to rethinking what is required of people if they are to live long and well in their places.

This chapter demonstrates how Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘microfascism’ is of crucial importance to an understanding of the complexities of contemporary pedagogical efforts to combat populism, right-wing extremism, and fascism. In particular, I discuss how ‘affect’ and ‘biopower’ are entangled in everyday processes of discipline and control, and argue that these concepts are pivotal for appreciating the affective relations and capacities of microfascism. To illustrate how affect and biopower are intimately linked to microfascist practices in schools and classrooms, I analyze two examples—one in health education and another in citizenship education. Finally, I suggest pedagogical strategies that could unmake microfascist subjectivities, emphasizing that it is important to understand the complexities involved since fascism is easily disguised in many forms that are often aligned with (neo)liberal values.

Any new account of privacy, especially one with the unusual combination of elements as is presented here, will require a conducive institutional environment. The environment proposed here is based on a new notion of regulation, in the broad sense of social control rather than the narrower sense of subsidiary legislation and despite the successes claimed for that latter form. In this broad sense, present regulation derives from the spread of power from sovereign institutions as means by which that sovereign power is transformed but still empowered and which can be seen in such shapes as biopower and the algorithmic determinism of human behaviour. The presently dominant form of regulation, responsive regulation, is best seen as mythological, especially through the manner in which it is informed by the republicanism of Pettit. In response, the new sense of regulation as social control focuses on the reimagining of institutions and the promotion of the existential interests of the individual to centre-stage. This is the reverse of current priorities.

Since the 1980s, environmental governance has seen the embrace of market-based instruments for managing all manner of environmental problems, from water shortages to overfishing, climate change to biodiversity loss. This turn to the market recalls the arguments and techniques of liberal political economy, with its focus on the market, private property, and individual self-interest as the best means of securing efficient allocation of resources. This has led scholars in environmental sociology and related fields to talk of the “neoliberalisation of nature.” This chapter aims to achieve two things: first, to draw out and examine the continuities and discontinuities between classical liberal formulations of the problem of scarcity and the neoliberal green economy. Second, to demonstrate the importance of combining Foucault’s later work on liberalism and biopower with Marxist critiques of capitalist political economy. The main takeaways of this chapter are for environmental sociologists to be cognizant of, and better able to account for, the historic shifts that have taken place since the 1960s. Neoliberalism is a political project that has since the 1970s sought to absorb and regulate the force of radical environmental social movements.

Chapter 5 argues that preoccupation with travel, topography, and geography merely formed the basis for even more ambitious projects that did, however, show the limits of what practical patriotism might achieve. When combined with a providential belief in the potential of the land, the application of geographical and botanical knowledge to the countryside meant that spaces which had hitherto been considered ‘empty’ or ‘wild’ could be filled with new meaning. Reformers were concerned with the role of people (Indians, but also Europeans, Africans, and Caribbeans of African descent, as well as enslaved people) in managing landscapes. They increasingly discussed questions of what we might call ‘biopower’ after Foucault, conceiving of labour and the management of the population as a resource. In this, reformers paid particular attention to the possibility that humans might influence environments in more profound ways than just by building roads. They hoped that human errors that had made Caribbean environments ‘unhealthy’ in the past could be reversed by building better-ventilated settlements, or regulating military barracks to help soldiers behave like agricultural settlers and make this land productive.

Across a variety of discursive practices, this chapter examines how anxieties about a post-Enlightenment sexuality generate regulation. It explores this effect on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Gothic narrative, which consistently depicts and dramatises non-normative sexualities, acts and characters (producing pathology and perversion), yet ultimately condemns and punishes these potentials and possibilities in order to re-establish the dominant, heteronormative practice. The aim is to demonstrate that, from a Foucauldian perspective, transgressive sexualities encountered in the Gothic embody both liberatory and restrictive potentials, and that non-heteronormative desires and acts are simultaneously the product and limit of biopower. Through a reading of such fictions as Vathek, The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Monk and Zofloya, the chapter argues that the deployment of sexuality produces a continual extension of areas for the maximisation of power and control.

This chapter assesses the neoliberalization of copyright law.It begins with the historical emergence of copyright as a form of public biopolitics.It then looks at three areas where copyright has become neoliberal.The first is incentives theory, which treats all creation as an economic calculation geared toward market rewards.I outline the theory, and show how it works not just to model, but to produce a certain kind of creator, to the exclusion of other forms of creativity.The second is litigation around hip-hop sampling.Here the demand for licensing works to nudge music into commercial channels, where all cultural borrowing is mediated through market transactions.The third is the recent expansion of copyright into what scholars have termed “paracopyright”: a prohibition on circumventing copyright protection technologies, which generally function as forms of “digital rights management” (DRM). Through a detailed examination of how DRM technologies (such as the regional restrictions on DVDs) function, I show how this addition to the law clearly marks a move in the direction of copyright into training individuals that they are consumers of the products of culture.

This chapter introduces and outlines the structure of the book and its argument.It begins with an extended look at litigation between two rival religious sects – the Worldwide Church of God and the splinter group Philadelphia Church of God – over access to doctrinal texts that the WGC owned the rights to, but that it had renounced.It thus provides a good example of how intellectual property can matter even in the most basic and intimate aspects of our lives.I then situate the book in the context of current literature on the expansion of intellectual property (IP) rights.Rather than note their expansion, I argue that the kind of power expressed in IP is subtly shifting.The chapter then offers a brief synopsis of the core Foucauldian theory behind the book – that power can operate according to different logics. It concludes with an outline of the remainder of the text.

This chapter treats developments in trademark in the context of the development of brand capitalism.Traditional trademark analysis displayed the features of a public biopolitics; developments around branding push it in a neoliberal direction.I focus on three developments.The first is trademark dilution, which protects brands as valuable in themselves. An extended analysis of Victoria’s Secret’s successful attempt to shut down a sex-toy shop that called itself “Victor’s Little Secret” shows how dilution also functions as a kind of subjectification.The second is a recent Supreme Court case ruling that, PTO rules against registration of disparaging trademarks violated the First Amendment.The result transfers power to brand owners.The third is the use of Geographic Indicators to protect “traditional” cultural indicia.This resistance strategy is a difficult one, as it risks entrenching conservative and stereotypical views of cultural groups, often at the expense of dissident forms. It thus illustrates an unexpected way that branding can function as a form of subjectification, and the potential limits of using trademarks and branding as strategies of resistance.

This chapter both provides a condensed case for why the analysis of intellectual property (IP) through differing regimes of power is a fruitful one, and details a couple of its implications. One is that we need to be attentive to the way IP law creates certain kinds of subjects, and to be willing to critique it on those lines.The other takes the form of a brief discussion of alternatives proposed to IP, in such areas as “low IP” zones and in creative commons-style proposals.I conclude that the degree to which these alternatives fundamentally challenge the neoliberalization of IP and its move away from public biopower, is essential in assessing the extent to which they actually are alternatives.The goal is not to be strongly prescriptive, but, in the manner of Foucault, to help figure out what are the right questions to ask.

This chapter develops the theoretical framework for the book.Using Foucault, the chapter introduces three models of power: juridical (sovereignty and rights-based), public biopower (promoting the productivity and health of the population in a general way), and neoliberal biopower (same objective as biopower, but working on individuals and treating everything as part of the economy).With neoliberal biopower, the emphasis is on subjectification and the development of homo economicus as a type.I then trace intellectual property (IP) from its emergence at the intersection of classical liberalism and juridical power to the current neoliberal form.My focus is on the contrast between the early, public biopower version of IP with the current, neoliberal one.The earlier version relies on the notion of benefits to an amorphous public and worries about the effects of monopolies; the newer version drops the aversion to monopoly and attempts to use property rights to capture and internalize public benefits, while putting pressure on individuals in the public to view their interaction with culture economically.I then analyze the current, Demsetzian theorization of IP as neoliberal.

Patent law is where the messy evolution of intellectual property into neoliberal biopower is most contested.I begin with the emergence of a new model of medicine in genomics and show how that model functions as a form of neoliberal subjectification insofar as it conceptualizes health as a form of risk management.I then turn to litigation surrounding the patentability of isolated gene fragments, which offers a nearly ideal case study of the stakes in how one models the form of power underlying subject-matter patentability, and how patentability encourages the development of neoliberal agents who model their health in terms borrowed from financial risk.I then turn to two other areas where the Supreme Court is pushing back against an expansive notion of patentability: its revival of patent exhaustion doctrine, and a series of decisions on subject-matter patentability.The chapter concludes by studying the Court’s ruling upholding the PTO’s inter partes review process.The administrative state is a key feature of public biopolitics, and the opinion, concurrence, and dissent clearly illustrate what is at stake in the intersection of differing understandings of power and intellectual property law.

SDG 7 aims to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all. Forests contribute to SDG 7 through four pathways: sustainable use of traditional wood fuels, processed wood fuels, liquid biofuels and biopower. We hypothesise that the role of traditional wood fuels (e.g. firewood and charcoal) in household energy portfolios will decline in most low- and middle-income countries, but will not be completely replaced with modern fuels. In the transition to affordable clean fuels, processed wood fuels (e.g. pellets), liquid biofuels produced from forest feedstock, and biopower will play an increasing role in energy service provision. How forest-based transitions to clean energy will fare relative to other renewable energy technologies (including solar, wind and micro-hydro) will depend on how renewable energy policy evolves, and on relative costs and storage capacity. Reaching SDG 7 through the promotion of large-scale hydro and agricultural commodity derived biofuels can threaten forests and forest-based livelihoods. In general, promoting transitions to sustainable forest-based clean energy supports the realisation of other SDGs, highlighting the potential for forests to play a significant role in discourse and action on the SDGs.