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Published within half a century from each other, French manual The Corset Through the Ages (1893) written by Ernest Léoty and the Swedish housing investigation The Family that Outgrows its Home (1941) led by social researcher Brita Åkerman constituted two landmarks of the sexo-political discourses for the construction of the sexualized body and the regulation of gender and family politics. While the French corsetier presented the stay as a technological and social mold of the feminine body that had its routes in antiquity, Åkerman was amassing one of the most thorough collections of knowledge on residential spaces in order to penetrate and modify daily life and social relations within the Swedish domestic realm.

This article juxtaposes two apparatuses external to the body —the corset of the Victorian period and the Swedish research-based domestic space of the postwar years— that were aimed at regulating the feminine and masculine anatomy and its movements, imposed physical and sexual literacy and instigated procreative conducts. By looking into the scientific discourses governing each mechanism, their specific technologies and the instructional knowledge designed to deploy them, this study seeks to chart how orthopedic politics developed during the 19th and 20th century through disciplinary exoskeletons have helped to invent, map out and fix the somatic fictions of sexual epistemology that constituted the basis of the biopolitical modern regime.

Through a close reading of garment patterns, housing plans, scientific texts, how-to manuals and usage guidelines, the article discusses Foucauldian models of biopolitical power and the administering of life as a tool for architectural analyses. Based on this proposition, it reflects on the centrality of sex and sexuality in modern ortho-architectural apparatuses and rises critical questions about their intervention into the biological and social structure of our contemporary society.