the Female Body GOVERNING

Regulation through Postfeminist Pharmacy 115
Although one can identify a variety of disciplinary techniques and
strategies in the contemporary West, Foucault’s later observations
about the art of government seem prescient as ours has increasingly
become a society of control and self-surveillance, comprising multiple
governing apparatuses that are not necessarily working in concert with
a nation-state. This is not to say that disciplinarity has disappeared;
institutions that house obvious disciplinary apparatuses—schools,
prisons, churches—certainly remain. Rather, the move toward a society
of control and self-discipline represents a contemporary horizontalization
of disciplinarity, as the recognizable signifi cance of institutions and
traditional ensembles of sovereignty (e.g., the nation-state) erode.
The move toward the immanence of self-surveillance and discipline
is intimately caught up in globalization. “The establishment of a global
society of control that smoothes over the striate of national boundaries,”
argue Hardt and Negri (2000, p. 332), “goes hand in hand with the
realization of the world market and the real subsumption of global
society under capital.” In light of the achievement of a nontranscendent,
transnational capitalism, Foucault’s understanding of governmental
rationality asks us to consider several types of governance or regulation
that are not necessarily articulated to traditional political institutions.
In other words, government does not concern itself with overt political
entities as much as it concerns itself with the conduct of human behavior,
or the “conduct of conduct,” in more general terms. Greene (1999) has
suggested that in contemporary society the art of government is best
described as an “abstract form of power materialized in the production
of rules, procedures, and norms that judge and regulate the behaviors of
a population,” which, in turn, “transforms the possibilities for conduct”
through the supplication of spaces for performance and the demarcation
of limits (p. 3). Governmentality refers to a productive and regulating
form of power that has become “less limited and bounded spatially in
the social fi eld” even though governing apparatuses operate by marking
abstract or mental spaces of possibility—of potential conduct (Hardt &
Negri, 2000, p. 330).
The nation-state can be said to comprise a governing apparatus that
is no longer as powerful or prominent as the multiplicity of governing
apparatuses that regulate consumerist populations (vis-à-vis a citizenry).
The new articulations of the gyniatric apparatus govern particular
female consumers as well. Before we describe the newer articulations of
the gyniatric apparatus, however, it is helpful to describe the elements
and function of a governing apparatus in general, how the governing
apparatus operates as a constantly changing and evolving mechanism of
deployment, or a dispositif, working to secure the welfare of a popula-