Sosyal Bilimler ve Sağlık Bülteni

Derleme Makale

No. 17 (2026)

Power from Birth to Death: The Body Between Biopolitics and Necropolitics

Submitted
February 21, 2026
Published
2026-03-11

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the regulatory and disciplinary practices of modern power over birth and death, the two ontological poles of life, through the theoretical perspectives of Michel Foucault, Achille Mbembe, and Zygmunt Bauman. Since the 18th century, modern power has evolved from the disciplining of individual bodies to the management of biological processes of the population, thereby transforming life itself into a strategic object of regulation. First, the study addresses the theme of birth on the axis of biopolitics, discussing how the female body is transformed into a field of surveillance through medical discourses, expert knowledge, and hospital-centered monitoring mechanisms. Within this framework, assisted reproductive technologies (IVF) and the medicalization of infertility in Turkey are examined in light of legal regulations, religious discourses, and pronatalist population policies to reveal how “normal” bodies and the “acceptable” family construct are reproduced. The second focus of the study, the theme of death, is problematized through Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics and Bauman’s life strategies. Beyond the “power to make live,” the “right to kill” and the capacity to “let die” are analyzed through the practices of camps, slavery, and colonial occupation. Simultaneously, the process in which death was excluded as a “scandal” and deconstructed by modernity, and how immortality has become mortal by being reduced to transient fame in the postmodern era, is evaluated. In conclusion, this article emphasizes that the body is a primary political battlefield where power technologies compete from birth to death. It seeks to contribute to the literature by discussing the possibility of creating meaning within this encirclement through Bauman’s ethics of “being for the Other.”

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