the Female Body GOVERNING

Regulation through Postfeminist Pharmacy 129
that marks them as defi cient—and therefore deviant—unless they accept
postfeminism’s ideology. In the case of the pharmaceutical industry’s
attempt to alter women’s experiences with menstruation, this occurs in
promotions that suggest good women are those who, for instance, can
continue to shop for clothing even while they are premenstrual. Good
women are those who rid themselves of their menstrual cycles so that
they can buy and wear midriff-revealing tops.
But such postfeminist discourse is not limited to its insistence on
articulating good women to consumption; it also articulates good women
to the emotional labor of relationship maintenance, whether it occurs
within or outside of their families. Although feminism paved the way for
women to have more power in their workplaces and made acceptable the
idea that women could—and should—work in occupations other than
those in the so-called helping and services professions, postfeminism
jerks women back from this utopic vision to insist that women who
participate in the wage labor system should also be primarily responsible
for the nurturing and fi lial concerns of home. Relying on an essentialist
view that marks women as biologically tethered to nurturance and
domesticity, postfeminism asks women to do both the wage labor and the
unremunerated labor of the private sphere (Vavrus, 2002). Postfeminist
discourse, then, marks as good women those who tend to their menstrual
cycles. Good women do not throw pillows out of exasperation with their
male partners, nor will they angrily thrust piles of too-small clothes
at female salespeople. Good women smile through their menopause
symptoms. Good women do not “embarrass” themselves by smelling bad
through their estrogen surges (in this discourse, good women have put
estrogen surges behind them). Good women thus demonstrate that they
are committed to being among the population of happy women whose
cycles—and by extension, everyday lives—can be regulated through the
gyniatric apparatus.
Conclusion
Warren (2002) points out that what is at stake with Seasonale can be
understood in Foucauldian terms. We suggest that her point is a valid
one in considering Sarafem’s and Remifemin’s postfeminist governance
as well. Just as plastic surgery, Botox, or other “surface” interventions
work to “sculpt” a more perfect female, synthetic hormones work on
both the surface and in depth to create a female made sexier through
a kind of androgyny. The move to erase menstruation from women’s
biology can lay claim to creating both these surface and inner changes
in women—from improving their looks (fl atter stomachs and fl awless