Biopolitics and Belonging: Foucault in the Age of Human Rights

The Broadest Horizon of Power

Power does not only punish. It does not only discipline. As Michel Foucault argued in the final stage of his work, modern power governs life itself. It counts births, manages health, regulates reproduction, categorises sexuality, and seeks to optimise populations. It no longer stops at the prison or the school. It reaches into the body, into medicine, into sexuality, into the everyday decisions of life and death.

Foucault called this biopower. Unlike the sword of the sovereign, biopower does not kill to demonstrate authority. It governs by nurturing life, by protecting populations, by administering health — but always unequally, always by deciding which lives are worth fostering and which can be neglected or exposed to harm.

This is not abstract philosophy. It is our daily political reality. Every debate about healthcare access, every restriction on reproductive autonomy, every pandemic measure, every attempt to police sexuality — all of these are exercises of biopower. And it is here that the challenge for human rights in the twenty-first century is clearest: to confront not only the repression of the state, not only the surveillance of the platform, but the regulation of life itself.

Reproductive Rights and the Politics of Life

Few issues show biopower more starkly than reproductive rights. Laws governing abortion, contraception, and assisted reproduction are about more than individual choice. They are about how states shape the size, composition, and future of populations.

In the United States, the repeal of Roe v Wade was justified not only in terms of morality but in terms of a population-level agenda: who should give birth, who should not, whose fertility should be controlled. Around the world, governments intervene in reproduction with chilling clarity: incentives for some to reproduce, restrictions on others, sterilisation campaigns, bans on abortion.

From a human rights perspective, the demand is clear. Autonomy over one’s body is not negotiable. But Foucault reminds us to see the deeper structure: these laws are not random. They are part of how modern states govern life. To defend reproductive rights, then, is not simply to defend “choice” in the abstract. It is to confront the machinery that decides which lives matter enough to be nurtured.

Trans Healthcare and the Struggle for Recognition

The same logic applies to trans healthcare. When access to gender-affirming care is gatekept, restricted, or criminalised, the issue is not just medical. It is biopolitical. It is about who is recognised as fully human, who is counted in the life of the population, whose bodies are permitted to flourish.

Trans and non-binary people know this in their bones. They encounter medical systems that insist on pathologising their existence, legal systems that deny recognition, and political campaigns that weaponise fear. These are not isolated injustices; they are manifestations of biopower, determining which forms of life are valued and which are deemed disposable.

Human rights advocacy here must be radical and unapologetic. It is not enough to prevent discrimination at the workplace or in housing, though those are essential. It is also necessary to challenge the very medical and legal categories that produce trans existence as marginal. It is to demand recognition not as an exception but as an equal part of humanity’s diversity.

The Pandemic and Population-Level Power

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed biopower more directly than any event in living memory. States intervened in everyday life with extraordinary measures: lockdowns, quarantine, vaccine mandates, border closures. These were not the old exercises of repression. They were forms of governance over life itself — attempts to preserve populations, to balance public health against economic life, to manage risk across entire societies.

Many of these measures were necessary; some measures were— according to critics—abusive. But what the pandemic showed is that biopower is inescapable. Governments are always managing life, whether they admit it or not. For human rights, the challenge is not to deny biopower’s existence but to insist that it operate with dignity, equality, and justice. That means resisting scapegoating, ensuring access to healthcare, protecting marginalised groups who were disproportionately exposed to harm.

Care of the Self: Resistance from Within

Foucault’s later work turned towards the question of ethics. If power reaches so deep into life, what forms of resistance remain? His answer was what he called the “care of the self.” Ancient philosophers, he noted, saw ethics as a practice of self-formation, of turning one’s life into a kind of work of art.

For modern rights advocates, this suggests a profound truth. Resistance is not only about fighting laws or surveillance. It is also about affirming dignity at the most intimate level. It is about people shaping their own identities, asserting control over their own bodies, and insisting on living lives that reflect their own truths. Trans people declaring their pronouns, women claiming control over reproduction, communities asserting their histories — these are not just symbolic acts. They are ethical practices of freedom in the face of biopower.

Human Rights and Biopolitics

So where does this leave human rights? Foucault teaches us that rights must move beyond the courtroom and even beyond the protection of individuals against repression. They must confront the governance of life itself.

• Rights must demand autonomy over bodies, reproduction, and identity.
• Rights must protect equality in healthcare, housing, and basic dignity.
• Rights must challenge categories that exclude some people from the population of the valued.
• Rights must recognise resistance as not only legal but cultural, narrative, ethical.

This is the task of rights in the twenty-first century: to face biopower squarely, to insist that no life be deemed disposable, to affirm the dignity of every person in the face of systems that sort and exclude.

Coda: No Going Back

In Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the final movement explodes with triumph. After struggle, after suspense, the music breaks through in C major, reinforced by piccolo, trombones, and contrabassoon — instruments unheard until that moment. The effect is overwhelming: a sense that nothing can stop the forward momentum.

This, too, is how human rights must be defended. Our work cannot pause at the first victory. Like Beethoven’s codas, it must hammer the point home with renewed force. Progress must be consolidated, repeated, pressed forward until retreat becomes impossible.

For me, and for Rights Aotearoa, this is not a passing commitment. It is a lifelong one. We are engaged in a struggle as broad as life itself — against harassment and hate, against surveillance and exclusion, against the governance of life that devalues some and privileges others. We are engaged in a struggle for dignity, equality, and freedom, and we will not give up.

We will continue until the work is finished, or until we ourselves are finished. Like Beethoven’s music, which presses forward until the final chord, our work insists on moving onward, never back. Even when the cadence is delayed, even when the resolution feels distant, the drive is unstoppable.

There can be tension. There can be waiting. There can be resistance. But there can never be retreat.

Rights Aotearoa will keep pressing forward — with clarity, with persistence, with the moral urgency of necessity. Until my own last breath, this is the work to which I am committed. And after that, others will continue it. For human rights, like Beethoven’s music, are not the expression of one individual alone. They are the unfolding of humanity’s deepest theme: liberty, developed and recapitulated until it fills the world with sound.