The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction

Foucault's central claim is that Western societies since the eighteenth century have not repressed sexuality but rather produced it—multiplying discourses about sex, subjecting it to scientific study, and making it the secret to be confessed and deciphered. He rejects the 'repressive hypothesis,' the widespread belief that Victorian morality silenced sex and that liberation consists in speaking about it. As Foucault argues, understanding sexuality solely in terms of repression is 'inaccurate and misleading'; repression is only one tactical element within a broader political strategy regarding sexuality .

The work introduces biopower: a form of power exercised at the level of populations, managing life through knowledge of reproduction, health, and demography. It also reframes power as productive rather than merely prohibitive—'the king's head' must be cut off in political thought, meaning power should not be analyzed only through the state or law. In IR, scholars have drawn on this reframing to critique state-centrism and to analyze how international regimes and discourses of development operate through productive power rather than mere coercion .

Discipline and Punish analyzed power operating on individual bodies through surveillance and normalization. Volume 1 extends this by introducing biopower, which operates at the level of populations—managing birth rates, mortality, health, and life expectancy. Foucault did not see these as mutually exclusive; they are superimposed technologies. As he put it, we have two technologies of power: one disciplinary, centered on the body, and one biopolitical, centered on life. Sexuality is a key example where both intersect: it is subject to individual surveillance but also inscribed in broad biological processes of population .

Foucault distinguishes two historical apparatuses for organizing sex. The deployment of alliance is a system of marriage, kinship, and inheritance—rules governing permitted and prohibited partners, tied to the economy of reproduction. The deployment of sexuality emerges later and operates through different mechanisms: it incites confession, produces knowledge through medicine and psychiatry, and targets the body's intensities and pleasures rather than legal kinship. The family becomes the site where both intersect. This shift from alliance to sexuality marks a transformation in how power invests the body and population.

Foucault argues that biopower creates a concern with 'making live and letting die'—managing populations to maximize vitality. Racism emerges when this biopolitical logic designates certain groups as threats to the health of the population, thereby justifying their elimination. Scholars have applied this framework to international relations by linking biopower to European colonialism and imperialism. As one analysis notes, Foucault himself asserted the link between biopolitics and European colonialism in 'Society Must Be Defended,' opening space for a genealogy of the international not contained by European borders .