the Female Body GOVERNING

Notes
Regulation through Postfeminist Pharmacy 131
1. Another example is “rhetorical pedagogy,” which works to produce public
citizens and circulate them within a public (Greene, 2002, pp. 434–443).
2. That something as horrifi c as genocide can occur at all, argues Foucault
(1990), means that power has been exercised at the level of “the large-scale
phenomenon of population” (p. 137). As we understand it, the signifi cance
of this formulation is precisely that a governing rationality is operating at
a very high level of abstraction that has fi nally dispensed of a juridical
mode in favor of what Habermas (1984) has termed “universal humanity.”
Presumably the direct, political consequences of this are, on the one hand,
the ability to contend with subjects as biological/living subjects (as opposed
to the abstraction of “citizen” or some other notion), yet, on the other hand, a
simultaneous ability to bury the sentiment of face-to-face encounter with the
faceless horde. In other words, the abstract citizen has been replaced by the
faceless mob.
3. This interiorizing movement is not to be understood, however, in terms of
consciousness per se, but rather, as an “enfolding,” a rendering of the “inside
as an operation of the outside . . . as if the ship were a folding of the sea”
(see Deleuze, 1986). From our reading, this is not to say that Foucault (1990)
denies the existence of an interior (for certainly an enfolding or envagination
is the creation of an interior however much its operations depend on the
outside), but rather, that one can best explain the workings of the modern
subject in terms of exteriors.
4. Among Foucault’s (1991a) many defi nitions of the term is that governmentality
is the “ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and
refl ections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very
specifi c albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its
principle form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical
means apparatuses of security” (p. 102).
5. Mary Russo’s The Female Grotesque (1994) points to the place of abjection in
the historical, virtual prohibition of female bodies from the public sphere
and in the marginalization of nonelite women (p. 12). Her project is to elevate
the grotesque in feminism to make it “heterogeneous, strange, polychromatic,
ragged, confl ictual, incomplete, in motion, and at risk” (p. 1). This move
is one that Russo believes poses a direct challenge to the normalization of
the bourgeois within feminism. Russo defi nes the grotesque body as “open,
protruding, irregular, secreting, multiple, and changing; it is identifi ed with
non-offi cial ‘low’ culture or the carnivalesque, and with social transformation”
(p. 8). Historical representations of women’s social movements articulate them
to groups of grotesques (see Douglas, 1994, e.g., about the use of grotesque
imagery in descriptions of second-wave feminists), and, Russo adds, “we
may begin a long list which would add to these curiosities and freaks whose
conditions and attributes which link these types with contemporary social and
sexual deviances, and more seemingly ordinary female trouble with processes
and body parts: illness, aging, reproduction, nonreproduction, secretions,
lumps, bloating, wigs, scars, make-up and prostheses” (p. 14).
However, she argues that precisely because of contemporary feminism’s
failure to truly incorporate the grotesque—to be at peace with it—feminism
has become what she believes is a politically exclusive movement that may be
in danger of narrowing itself into irrelevance for vast numbers of women. To
extend Russo’s argument, we suggest that recoding the grotesque and its abject
qualities as positive moves feminism away from the postfeminist dimension of
the gyniatric apparatus.