the Female Body GOVERNING

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joshua gunn & mary douglas vavrus
the increasing impossibility of achieving or maintaining the norms of
“good (mental) health” deployed in its discourse makes the apparatus
viable as an economic or profi t producing one—and a visibly coherent
one as well.
This chapter focuses specifi cally on one part of the health-care
apparatus—that which is concerned with the bourgeois female body—to
demonstrate how a health-care apparatus in general works to fabricate
and regulate a population for economic ends. This implies that what the
health-care apparatus shares in common with governing apparatuses in
general is the problem of the contemporary immanence of capital.
In traditional Marxian political economy, crisis theory held that
capital was an imperial force that continuously expanded to avert the
looming crisis of overaccumulation. More contemporary understandings
of capital, however, characterize its movement as immanent—that global
capital must move inside, to its interior, continually rearranging the
forces and relations of production. Put more concretely: When capital
has nowhere to expand and therefore can no longer exploit the labor
of a given population, then it must do other things to remain dynamic.
One thing capital has done, argue Hardt and Negri (2000), is shift
to a post-Fordist economic structure that uses immaterial labor—the
labor of exchanging knowledge and information (p. 290). Another
thing that has happened is the manufacturing of commodities for
which there is no human need. We suggest the latter strategy is one of
the principal means by which the pharmaceutical component of the
health-care apparatus maintains economic viability in immanent terms;
it foregrounds obscure diseases (whose very diagnoses are often quite
contested), especially mental diseases/illnesses or virtual social deaths,
to continuously administer life.
The production of commodities that have no apparent use is, of
course, nothing new; it simply requires a discourse of demand. What
seems different in our neoliberal age are the ways in which economic
interests articulate production to governing apparatuses that are
always already at work. In other words, to create a successful circuit of
production and consumption, pharmaceutical corporations must deploy
promotional discourses that are articulated to established modes of
governance, which have already been successful in regulating a given
population; this necessity is not only born of the post-Fordist manner
in which capital currently operates, but also, again, because capital is
an immanent force: it must work on the interior. We suggest that the
regulation and governance of the female body, through the gyniatric
apparatus, is one of many apparatuses that have been articulated to the
larger machinations of the health industry.