Biopolitics of Sexuality

Biopolitics of Sexuality, as coined in Ruti's argument, names the operation by which the pornography industry functions not merely as entertainment or commerce but as a technology of subject-formation — a mechanism that instrumentalizes libido, shapes the modality of being, and reproduces a gendered object/subject binary. The concept fuses a Foucauldian biopolitical register (the administration and shaping of bodies and populations at the level of desire and subjectivity) with a Lacanian-feminist analysis of jouissance and ideology: porn is not simply a cultural product that reflects existing norms but an active apparatus that produces sexuality as a structured field, channeling jouissance into pre-scribed circuits and locking it within heteropatriarchal coordinates. The "multibillion-dollar porn industry" is, in this reading, a machine that does what ideology does in its most libidinal mode — it operates below the level of conscious belief, through fantasy-frames and drive-satisfaction, to fashion subjectivities that are barely aware of being fashioned.

Crucially, the concept also identifies a political-discursive blockage: the feminist legacy of "unqualified sex-positivity" — itself a hard-won counter to moralistic repression — has paradoxically foreclosed critique of misogynistic pornographic content by collapsing any such critique into anti-sex conservatism. The biopolitics of sexuality therefore operates on two levels simultaneously: at the level of the apparatus (porn as subjectivity-shaping technology) and at the level of discourse (the ideological closure that renders critique of that apparatus illegible). This double operation is what makes it properly biopolitical: not only are bodies and pleasures administered, but the very terms in which one might resist that administration are pre-emptively neutralized.

Biopolitics of Sexuality appears in mari-ruti-penis-envy-and-other-bad-feelings-the-emotional-costs-of-everyday-life (p.122) and sits at the intersection of several major canonical nodes. Its closest anchor is Ideology: like the Lacanian-Žižekian account of ideology that operates through jouissance and fantasy rather than through consciously held beliefs, the pornographic apparatus works not by convincing subjects of anything but by shaping their libidinal economy at a level below articulate assent — cynical distance ("I know it's just porn") is no protection, since the fashioning happens through the body's enjoyment. The concept is equally indebted to Jouissance: porn is theorized as an industry that captures and re-routes the drive's satisfaction, standardizing what should be the singular, idiosyncratic circuit of each subject's jouissance into a mass-reproducible format — the superego's command to "Enjoy!" is here institutionalized at industrial scale. The concept also draws on Fantasy: if fantasy provides the coordinates through which the subject learns to desire, then pornographic fantasy-frames function as a culturally dominant fantasy-apparatus, teaching new generations what to want and how to want it, while simultaneously screening the Real of the non-sexual relation.

The cross-reference to Feminine Sexuality and Objectality signals the gendered asymmetry Ruti diagnoses: the object/subject binary reproduced by heteropatriarchal porn maps onto the structural asymmetry between masculine and feminine positions — woman is placed on the side of the object (the "not-all" that is viewed and consumed) while the masculine subject position is confirmed as the gazing, desiring subject. Pornification names the broader cultural diffusion of this apparatus, while Desire and Subjectivity mark what is at stake: it is not merely sexual preference but the "entire modality of being" — the subject's very form of desire and self-relation — that the biopolitical technology of sexuality claims to shape. The concept is therefore an extension and specification of ideology-critique into the domain of sexual subjectification, arguing that libidinal economy is itself a site of biopolitical governance.

Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The Emotional Costs of Everyday LifeMari Ruti · 2018 (p.122)

the multibillion-dollar porn industry is one of the most powerful tools of this fashioning, fundamentally shaping the sexuality, and perhaps even the entire modality of being, of new generations of people

The phrase "entire modality of being" is theoretically decisive: it shifts the claim from the register of sexual preference or behavior (something contingent and revisable) to the register of subjectivity as such, suggesting that what the pornographic apparatus produces is not a set of habits but a structured way of inhabiting the world — which is precisely what Lacanian theory means when it insists that fantasy and jouissance are constitutive of the subject, not merely decorative. The word "fashioning" further implies an active, technological crafting of selves rather than a passive reflection of pre-existing desires, aligning the concept squarely with the biopolitical thesis that populations are produced, not merely governed.