the Female Body GOVERNING

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tion, and the way in which discursive strategies work to articulate the
specifi city of an apparatus, or in other words, how discourse works to
coordinate the elements of an apparatus into a functional, productive,
and identifi able whole.
The Governing Apparatus
A governing apparatus is a material structure akin to a machine but not
reducible to one insofar as the population regulated comprises humans
who feel, act, and make choices in ways that are never guaranteed. It
is at once both an abstraction and a concrete composition of elements
that work together toward two ends simultaneously: it “identifi es a
population in need of calibration at the same time as it mobilizes that
population to perform its own transformation” (Greene, 1999, p. 5). In
other words, an apparatus fabricates or constructs a problem in relation
to a particular group of individuals and encourages that group to
self-manage the problem via any number of practices, techniques, and
habits that catalyze modes of self-discipline. The logic of the apparatus
is performative, however, meaning that regulation is a dynamic process
that continuously redefi nes the problem and the population in discourse;
there may be a historical origin of the specifi city of a given apparatus
and the discursive strategies associated with it, but this origin should
be understood as a reconfi guration of older apparatuses and/or their
disarticulated constitutive elements (again, practices, policies, institutions,
techniques, etc.). In other words, apparatuses are not caused by
this or that human being or group; they govern them, and they have
done so since the emergence of the global society of control.
Greene (1999) has identifi ed one example of a contemporary governing
apparatus as the “population apparatus,” a mode of governance that
regulates human reproduction abstractly and transnationally through a
complex assembly of discourses, institutions, practices, and procedures. 1
The population apparatus began to coalesce, argues Greene, in the
theories of Thomas Robert Malthus, which were responsible for giving
shape to a modern problematic—a looming population explosion—and
for defi ning the “couple” as an object of regulation or governance to
help address the problem. In his book-length analysis and critique
of the population apparatus, Greene argues that since Malthusian
rationality was set into motion, the population apparatus has expanded
to include a host of practices (contraception), policies (domestic planning),
political institutions (family planning agencies), and discursive
strategies (rhetorics of crisis) that continuously reinscribe a kind of
reproductive apocalypse, shifting to regulate new problem populations