Biopolitics

Biopolitics refers to the intersection between politics and biology. It was popularized by Foucault in the 1970s, who understood biopolitics as various mechanisms of power that could be utilized in governing people. Biopolitics manifests itself through various disciplines that subject individual bodies to surveillance and trains them to internalize politics. For example, with weight, the FDA sets categories of "overweight," "underweight," etc, organizing a system of classifying and ordering the population. This, in turn, creates a "norm" that seems natural rather than culturally constructed. Thus, the individual wants to lose weight to comply with this norm.