Bio-Power

The following details are crucial in understanding the intricacy of "medicalization," which is a facet of bio-power. According to philosopher Michel Foucault (1979), bio-power refers to modern states' use of power technology to regulate their subjects. He claimed that in today's complex civilizations, people will not tolerate dictatorial state power. As a result, modern states must discover ways to hide the methods they use to control their populations, such as collecting data on their populations' health, reproductive capacities, and sexual practices in order to regulate and intervene. Laura Briggs, for example, is a historian who shows how, during the colonial occupation of the United States and Puerto Rico in the early twentieth century, public health officials dealt with the problem of overpopulation and sexual immorality by studying eugenics policies: (the arrangement of reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable diseases) This is a means of 'enhancing' the human race that only fell out of favor after the Nazis perverted its principles.) to restrict Puerto Rican women's ability to reproduce. As previously stated, disparities in class and race have led to a movement by poor and working-class women of all backgrounds to restrict their sexuality and reproduction.