the Female Body GOVERNING

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joshua gunn & mary douglas vavrus
2001, p. 3). Yet not all experts are as sanguine about menstruation
cessation. As Warren (2001, 2002) and Stein (2003) point out, several
hormone experts, physicians, and researchers react to the prospect of
menstruation cessation with uncertainty and even negativity. However,
mainstream media treatments have been positive overall. In other words,
although skepticism and concern exist in the medical and scientifi c
communities about the elimination of menstruation, no such skepticism
emerges in the glowing stories that have appeared in media texts. For
example, Warren (2002) includes a quote from Cosmopolitan magazine,
whose author suggests that without those pesky menstrual periods, you
“have three to fi ve extra days in the month you can wear white pants
or go skinny dipping” (p. 18). Another author, this one writing in the
London Independent, points to another great feature of the lack of a
period, “your stomach stays fl at so you can show off your midriff all year
round” (in Warren, 2002, pp. 18–19). It’s dubious, at best, to think that
either of these authors is revealing advantages that “help women individually
and society as a whole,” as The Lancet’s physician-authors believe
menstruation cessation will. But even so, the promotion of menstruation
cessation and Seasonale, as Warren points out, is risky because it (ironically
enough) encourages women to fl ood their bodies with hormones
to stop the “overdose” of hormones (Coutinho’s theory) that results
from menstruation. Women can trade one set of problems—those that
accompany menstruation—with another: those incurred through the
ingestion, implantation, or injection of synthetic hormones.
The medical rationale for using Seasonale, expressed by Coutinho
and in The Lancet, is also the site at which the gyniatric apparatus
operates. By couching the promotion of Seasonale in the language
of self-help that benefi ts individual women and “society as a whole,”
Coutinho and his supporters can regulate the constituted population
of menstruating women by casting Seasonale use as both a remedy for
individual suffering and as a public service. Suggesting that “good”
women will take Seasonale simultaneously brings into existence a deviant
population: all those women who will opt not to take Seasonale, who
will thus continue to “poison” themselves, make their fashion choices
more diffi cult and experience what Coutinho believes is an “obsolete”
process. The Seasonale-taking subject, on the other hand, has consented
to surveiling her own and her sisters’ cycles and managing them as a
part of the gyniatric apparatus’s governance. In other words, taking
Seasonale to eradicate the menstrual cycle demonstrates tacit approval
for the regulating conditions set out by Seasonale’s backers. Moreover, it
requires these individuals’ interpellation into the postfeminist discourse
that insists that as much distance as possible be placed between women