the Female Body GOVERNING

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joshua gunn & mary douglas vavrus
complexions), their dispositions (no more premenstrual snarling or
depression), their health (no more endometriosis or ovarian cancer),
and their generally unruly bodies (no more smells, “accidents,” or
strange cravings for chocolate or sex). The net effect is what, following
and expanding on Foucault, numerous feminists have framed as the
“female, docile body” (p. 9).
Sarafem, Seasonale, and Remifemin encourage internalizing docility
for women through a gyniatric apparatus. Postfeminist discursive practices
constitute an important part of this apparatus and aid signifi cantly
in the pharmaceutical industry’s governance of a population of postmenarche,
bourgeois female bodies. By articulating menstruation and
menopause treatment to individualized self-care, materialized through
commodifi cation and consumerism, postfeminism operates in the service
of biopower.
However totalizing this discourse may seem, particularly where it is
articulated to an apparatus of governance, biopower leaves us an out.
That is, in its blindness to the particular disciplining of the individual
on the basis of dichotomies, a governmental rationality of security, in
its exercise of biopower, also helps to generate:
a new kind of counterpolitics. As governmental practices have
addressed themselves in an increasingly immediate way to “life”. . .
individuals have begun to formulate the needs and imperatives of
that same life as the basis for political counter-demands. Gordon,
1991, p. 5)
To wit, just as discipline produces deviancy, so too does the emergence
of biopower produce counterconducts that are able to thrive precisely
because the norm has replaced the rule.
One important reason that the emergence of biopower is signifi cant is
that the “life” it concerns is always capable of outwitting any biopolitics
of regulation, for example, rallies for reproductive rights (see Gordon,
1991, p. 5) and even resistance to the pharmaceutical pathologization
of the process of menstruation (see Stein, 2003). The potential “reversibility”
of biopolitics means that the arena of possible action is always
open. Biopower is the apotheosis of a managerial abstraction that closes
down some possibilities as it opens others. In this case, the advertisements
and media reports that promote Sarafem and Seasonale have
been met with skepticism by feminists, some journalists, and medical
researchers. That their criticisms, although not commensurate with the
products’ promotions, reach mainstream media at all exemplifi es what
biopower may permit.