The most important person here in theorizing the body is Michel Foucault. Foucault's term “biopower” refers to the forms of knowledge about the body and the institutions that create such knowledge forms: disciplinary power and regulatory power. The first deals with individual bodies and the disciplines of observation and examination by which taxonomies of bodies are created. On the other hand the body at the species level is described by regulatory power which devises policies to regulate the body at a collective level (see Sawicki).

Biopower is disciplinary power. The power of different disciplines that began to be formed from the seventeenth century onwards are disciplinary powers i.e., the power to discipline people and make them think about themselves and others through the paradigms of disciplines. First, disciplinary power emanates from disciplinary practices, and second, regulatory power which has to do through policies, ideas of health and interventions by the government in a bid to ensure the welfare of the people. This is the power that inheres in any authority as far as the body is concerned.

Foucault argues that the individual body is just an illusion and that we think that our bodies are ours over which we have full control. He says on the other hand that the individual body is not something that belongs completely to an individual. It is a social instrument and it is malleable, changeable and a docile tool of productivity. So it is only an illusion to think that we are in full possession of our body. And within this theorizing the body is very much a social affair.