the Female Body GOVERNING

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joshua gunn & mary douglas vavrus
in various ways: most recently in ways specifically tied to menstruation,
deploying postfeminism and its rhetoric of self-empowerment to
accomplish this task.
Biopolitical Regulation
We need to see things not in terms of the replacement of a society of
sovereignty by a disciplinary society and the subsequent replacement
of a disciplinary society by a society of government; in reality one has
a triangle, sovereignty-discipline-government, which has as its primary
target the population and as its essential mechanism the apparatuses
of security.
—Michel Foucault (1991, p. 102)
In her elegant explication of Foucault’s concept of biopolitics and
its relation to governmental rationality, Laurel Graham (1997) unfolds
Foucault’s triangulation of sovereignty-discipline-government into a
continuum: At one end is the sovereign’s right to “take life or let live”
as manifest in slavery and torture (Foucault, 1990, p. 138); moving
toward more abstract (and more internalized or invasive) tactics is
the abode of what Foucault terms “semio-critiques,” rhetorics of
threat or virtual punishment that eclipse punishment itself; further,
“as we approach panopticism,” suggests Graham, “the subject becomes
more active in working out the reasons to conform” to the will of
the state (para. 54). Moving further along the continuum, processes
of surveillance become internalized (and the necessity of the police
recedes; Gordon, 1991, p. 20), and self-discipline becomes the principal
means by which an agency “governs at a distance.” The fundamental
difference among different points on this social continuum concerns
the ends of governance. A sovereign and disciplinary society administers
death in obvious, concrete ways. Contemporary logics of governance
seem increasingly immaterial, however, and seek to promote life by
defining and regulating populations. Whereas older tactics of discipline
focused on the individual body as such, governmental rationality
aims toward the regulation of the abstraction of a group of people,
a “population” as a collection of types of bodies, to secure their
well-being or welfare. Foucault suggested these ends are pursued, as
opposed to achieved, by numerous dispositifs, apparatuses of security,
or what Ronald Walter Greene (1999) has helpfully dubbed “governmental
apparatuses” (also see Deleuze, 1992; Hardt & Negri, 2000,
pp. 329–330).