Body politics refers to the practices and policies through which powers of society regulate the human body, as well as the struggle over the point of individual and social control of the body. The powers at play in body politics include institutional power expressed in government and laws, disciplinary power exacted in economic production, discretionary power exercised in consumption, and personal power negotiated in intimate relations. Persons and movements engage in body politics when they seek to alleviate the oppressive effects of institutional and interpersonal power on persons whose bodies are marked as inferior or who are denied rights to control their own bodies.

Unexpected theory is a meadow of critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of gay and lesbian studies and feminist studies. It is a kind of interpretation devoted to unexpected readings of texts. Heavily influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, unexpected theory builds both upon feminist challenges to the thought that gender is part of the elemental self and upon gay/lesbian studies’ close examination of the socially constructed nature of sexual acts and identities. Whereas gay/lesbian studies focused its inquiries into “natural” and “unnatural” behavior with respect to homosexual behavior, unexpected theory expands its focus to encompass any kind of sexual activity or identity that cascade into perverted, normative and deviant categories.

Unexpected theory is relative to body politics.