Normativity, Biopolitics, and the Dangerous Individual

This essay follows the historical and ideological veins of U.S. biopolitical violence against Mexican bodies, drawing on Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics and the legacy of Malthusianism. I analyze how nineteenth-century figures like Josiah Strong fused racist pseudoscience, religious rhetoric, and populationist discourse to legitimize colonial expansion, which necessitated the disciplining of racialized bodies. These frameworks persist in contemporary practices, such as the forced sterilization of Mexican women in 1960s Los Angeles and the ongoing War on Drugs, which disproportionately harms Mexican and Latinx communities. Drawing on scholars like Jade S. Sasser and Oswaldo Zavala, the paper argues that U.S. governmental policies continue to be informed by a logic of “survival of the fittest” and Anglo-Saxon exceptionalist theology, constructing Mexican populations as threats. This rhetoric is used to justify state violence as a project of security and progress, ultimately obscuring the ongoing project of extermination.

Foucault argued that fear of the ineluctable criminal was one means through which state power expanded in the late 1800s. This suggests that power works through affect and emotion, but Foucault does not delve into exactly how populations are made to experience fear, or how that fear is channeled towards the criminal. This paper aims to fill that gap through an examination of detective fiction, part of what Foucault called the "literature of criminality" that spreads fear. It focuses on the affective content of Sherlock Holmes stories, demonstrating how both the form and content of Sherlock stories inspired particular forms of fear in audiences, channeled that fear towards criminals, and then, in solving the crime, transmuted fear of the criminal into love of the state. It concludes with a discussion of how religious studies hermeneutics shed light on the operations of power. 

Canguilhem, Foucault, and the Concept: A Discursive View of 'Biological Sex' in Trans-exclusive Radical Feminism.