Foucault, Sexuality and the Neoliberal Biopolitics of Population: Gary Becker’s Economics of Fertility

This Paper advances sexuality as a crucial element for examining the relationship between biopolitics and neoliberalism, focusing specifically on the Chicago School economist Gary S. Becker’s early work on the economics of fertility. Following an examination of how sexuality disappears from Foucault’s work after the History of Sexuality 1: Will to Knowledge, the article proposes a more demographically nuanced understanding of ‘biopolitics’ and the reinstatement of the interrogative framework of sexuality into the genealogy of neoliberalism. It focuses on Becker’s introduction of a new order of knowledge of population that reconceptualised the determinants of the quantity and quality of children through theories of rational choice consumer behaviour and validated existing postwar sexual and racial hierarchies through the prioritisation of white middle-class nuclear family life as the norm. This study thus fills a gap left in Foucault’s lectures by demonstrating how the genealogies of sexuality, neoliberalism, and biopolitics are intimately connected.