Biopolitics is perpetuated and extended through scholarship and language.

There is much more at stake than just the symbolic construction and natu-ralisation of gender and religion through political regulation. Speaking more broadly, the issue is how sovereign power intervenes into the lives of all individuals in order “to decide [on] life and death”. 18 Today, life in and beyond the configurations of the state is bound to a sovereign biopower that offers people possibilities for empowerment even as it threatens them with destruction. People are thereby bound to an ambivalent form of power that produces both sovereign subjects and social outcasts. The processes by which those marginalised become empowered are complex, however, and do not just disappear once equal legal footing is achieved. Instead, margin-alised groups and individuals continue to be associated with marginalised knowledge and forced into interdependent, essentialised categories such as “gender”, “sexuality”, “race”, “religion”, “class”, “nation” and so forth. As power, sovereignty becomes both violent and effective time and again when-ever the right structures are in place and allow it to have an impact.19

The establishment of and debate over the notion of “biological citizenship” underscores how national as well as transnational regulations increasingly reinforce access to or even exclusion from life-sustaining commodities.20 For that matter, it is becoming increasingly clear that the ability to secure certain rights and even basic liberties is always reliant upon citizenship. The legal constructs of a given polity, however, are connected primarily to hegemonic, religious, and hierarchical constructs organised on the basis of gender.

The modern “Western” nation state is based on ties amongst birth, terri-tory and order and has its origins in the spatialisation of a legal order that registers life as birth.21 Michel Foucault describes how “Western” modernity ultimately conceives of the territorial state as a “population state”. Accord-ingly, the modern state-as-biopower subjects natural, reproductive life to its own interventions: “Biopolitics therefore can only be conceived of as ‘bioregulation by the state’”.22

Toward the end of the 1970s, Foucault developed the concept of govern-mentality in order to describe the regulation of individuals by late capitalist societies. The modern state is described as a complex combination of tech-nologies that facilitate both individualisation and totalisation. Through the secularisation of Christian technologies of confession – what Foucault calls “pastoral power” – particular modes of subjectivation fundamental to capi-talist socialisation were brought into being. Foucault explains,

by governmentality I understand the ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific, albeit very complex, power that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowl-edge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument. 23

These “apparatuses of security” constitute a technology designed to safe-guard the collective from internal dangers; in other words, the “enemies” of a nation who purportedly pose the greater threat to security are no longer “foreign elements” on the outside, but “abnormals” within.

In “Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times”, Jasbir K. Puar describes how the configuration of the American nation state is sym-bolically reorganised together with its sense of national belonging in times of neoliberal expansion using strategies like “counter-terrorism” and what she calls “securitisation”.24 Puar also describes how interrelated notions of reli-gion and sexuality play a role in this process, which is emerging as a global paradigm. If the symbolic order is historically based on heteronormativity, this is now accompanied by homonormative ideologies as well. This illus-trates how neoliberal politics succeeds in integrating select queer subjects into the nation state, particularly through legal strategies of recognition. Such subjects become acceptable by refashioning them as agents of life and productivity rather than continuing to stigmatise them as “agents of death”. The inclusion of some queer subjects nevertheless comes at the expense of creating another population of orientalised terrorist bodies. Encouraged by the sense that a state of exception exists, this notion of homonormativity persistently relies upon closely connected ideals of race, class, gender and nation.25

Allegations of homophobia amongst racialised and religicised “others” assist in the