the Female Body GOVERNING

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joshua gunn & mary douglas vavrus
could be PMDD.” The female actors in the television ad each appears
to betray what is expected of her, according to stereotypic notions that
still abound about women: one of the women is so affected by PMDD
that she is prevented from partaking in that quintessentially female
activity of shopping. The other apparently causes harm to her romantic
relationship. The print advertisements are less dramatic and, instead
of depicting unpleasant scenarios, they show women who appear to
have treated their PMDD—apparently with Sarafem. One, found in TV
Guide, features the upper half of a grinning woman bending into the
advertisement’s copy, her torso cut off by the frame of the ad. “Mood
swing” is at the top of the page in large block letters; however, “mood”
is crossed out with green ink strokes, followed by smaller block letters
below it: “Think it’s PMS? Think again.” An inch or so below that is the
following: “It could be PMDD,” followed by Eli Lilly’s pitch: 7
Irritability, sadness, sudden mood changes, tension, bloating. If you
suffer from many of these symptoms month after month and they
clearly interfere with your daily activities and relationships, you could
have PMDD. PMDD—Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder—is a distinct
medical condition that is characterized by intense mood and physical
symptoms right before a period.
At the bottom of this ad is a picture of the half pink–half purple Sarafem
pill, perched above these words: “More like the woman you are.” The
other print ad that circulated for Sarafem was very similar to the fi rst,
but featured a facial shot of a serenely smiling woman under the word
“irritability” in block letters, this time with the “irrit” crossed out with
strokes of green ink. The remainder of the ad’s text was identical to
the fi rst.
Not only do these Sarafem ads rest on hide-bound expectations
about women, they promote a product that purports to restore women
to their authentic, presumably balanced selves—far from the ravages
of menstrual hormones—through the ingestion of a pill composed of
synthetic substances created in pharmaceutical laboratories. They also
present symptoms that many women and men might feel, either cyclically
or more often, 8 as a result of conditions that may have little to do with
individual chemical imbalances and much to do with structural factors,
such as workplace or economic conditions. In glossing over any other
possibilities for the generalized symptoms, Eli Lilly makes its product
part of the gyniatric apparatus’s deployment of postfeminism. In other
words, the marketing of Sarafem focuses on PMS as a marker of an
abject, out-of-control body and thus uses postfeminism’s consumerist