Biocriminals, Racism, and the Law: Friendship as Public Disorder

This chapter explores the concept of "public order" as a biopolitical dispositif that structures and legitimizes state interventions in gender, kinship, and reproduction across Western legal systems. Drawing on Foucault’s and Agamben’s theories of power, Pérez Navarro examines how public order functions not only as a moral framework but as a mechanism for the microphysical distribution of sovereign power, reinforcing racial, gendered, and sexual norms. The chapter highlights how institutions such as monogamous marriage and civil registration become tools of exclusion, particularly affecting queer, trans, non-monogamous, and racialized subjects, whose life projects are treated as threats to national coherence. By tracing the colonial and Islamophobic genealogy of public order, the author reveals its ongoing role in maintaining Western sexual exceptionalism and homonationalist politics. The chapter concludes by reclaiming "friendship"—as theorized by Foucault—not as a private refuge but as a site of political resistance, capable of disrupting the heteronormative, racialized order inscribed in legal and social norms. Friendship, thus, becomes a figure of “public disorder” that challenges the state’s monopolization of legitimate relationality.