The sexed body in power relations

Abstract

In Foucault, the problem of power appears always referred to the materiality of the body, its characteristics and potentialities. With the concept of disciplinary power, he points out a power that individualizes the bodies aiming to make them useful and docile. Foucault also highlights a power that is exercised on the population (biopolitics), which recognizes the collectivity and intervenes on it, specifically about your bodily condition. From this theoretical framework described above, this study aims to analyze the path of increasing politicization of themes connected with the body and sexuality that have gained prominence throughout the 20th century and how these themes were incorporated into the daily debate of the populations, at least partially. From the methodological point of view, it is a qualitative and theoretical study that gathers definitions for the analysis of recurrent presence of body themes in different contexts of contemporaneity. Among the results obtained, we put that the qualifying characteristics of the living human body, such as gender, sexuality and age became the target of a permanent attention, whether in the form of knowledge production about them or even as object of sensitizing awareness that takes the body by its political dimension, thus, inscribing it in institutionalized policies and legislations. As a partial conclusion, it is stated that there is a far-reaching normative and valuation change under way, which has the sexed body as its center.