Marking groups as different justifies regulating and refashioning their lives

Evidence

The production of material and symbolic difference is, in other words, entangled with forceful calls, as well as concrete measures, to regulate, control, and refashion Muslims’ lives and subjectivities. The “Muslim Question” can thus be considered as a form of what Foucault calls governmentality, or “a mode of power concerned with the maintenance and control of bodies and persons, the production and regulation of persons and populations, and the circulation of goods insofar as they maintain and restrict the life of the population” (Butler, 2004, p. 52). — Sarah Bracke and Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar, “They Love Death as We Love Life”, 60

Categorization

• DEFINE: Provides Butler’s compact definition of governmentality as power over bodies, persons, and populations.
• XREF: Links to Foucault’s biopolitics and to Agamben-style sovereignty debates on who is made killable versus governable.