Referring to several major reforms in German family policy, feminist scholars have indicated significant transformations, however also often lack the socio-political contextualization of these developments and fail to question the concept of family itself. First I want to argue for a feminist appropriation of a biopolitical approach to analyze family as a central aspect of population policy and strategic political intervention in favor of welfare and labor market reform goals. Although the concept of biopolitics transcends conventional concepts of the political by focusing explicitly on questions of life and intimate relations, feminist debates about the social regulation of reproduction are strikingly absent in Foucault’s work on the politics of life. Secondly this paper therefore argues for confronting the notion of biopolitics with central feminist debates on family and social reproduction. Finally, the paper sketches the implications of such an analytical approach for the analyses of current German family policy.
