the Female Body GOVERNING

Regulation through Postfeminist Pharmacy 117
(e.g., the urban poor, the American woman, and the racialized Other
in less-developed countries).
Insofar as Malthusian logics concern a looming or imminent problem
that threatens the lives of a population, Greene (1999) identifi es the
central logic of the population apparatus as that of promoting and
sustaining life (pp. 17–20). Foucault (1990) outlined this “modern”
promotional and administrative character of contemporary governance
at the end of the fi rst volume of The History of Sexuality. There, Foucault
detailed the transformation of political power from that of wielding
or preventing death to that of promoting and “administering life,” a
historical unfolding of the productive nature of power as such (p. 138).
In general, says Foucault, “power over life” came in two forms. The fi rst
form is that of discipline from without, “an anatomo-politics of the
human body” or a microphysics of power that specifi cally addresses the
body. In Discipline and Punish, for example, Foucault (1995) described
discipline and the assemblage of techniques it organizes in terms of a
gradual recession of conspicuous modes of domination (such as torture,
the prison system, etc.) and the emergence of various machineries of
power that subjected a “docile” body to regimented modes of conduct
(e.g., “exercise,” and later, self-surveillance; pp. 160–162; 195–228). In
this earlier work discipline is not wielded by institutions, but is both
a “type of power” and a “modality for its exercise” that focuses on the
individual (p. 217).
The second kind of power over life concerns kinds or “species” of
bodies and the characteristically sociological categories of demography
and surveillance in relation to their being living things: “propagation,
births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity”
are the (characteristically sexual) processes that this second kind of
power over life seeks to manage (Foucault, 1990, p. 139). The practices
that aim to manage the behavior and thoughts (collectively, the
“conduct”) of a given individual as a member of a particular population
is termed biopower. Combined with the subjection-effect of so many
disciplinary techniques, for Foucault the exercise of biopower marks
the “threshold of modernity” in the sense that it heralds a moment
when “the life of [a] species is wagered on its own political strategies”
(p. 143). 2
Biopower can be said to work through or within a governing apparatus
in a peculiar way: Because of its attention to populations over that of the
individual citizen, governing apparatuses function in terms of norms,
not laws. Hence one consequence of the development of biopower,
says Foucault (1990), was a decline in juridical forms of power and a
transformation of the juridical subject into the self-disciplining subject