the Female Body GOVERNING

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kristin a. swenson
and don’t enjoy the things you once loved.” This ad demonstrates that
the symptoms of anxiety are subordinated to those of depression. This
inversion suggests an alteration not only in a shift of affective symptoms
but also a historical transformation in the experience of the depressed.
With tranquilizers such as Miltown and later Valium, the agitated,
threatening, and discontented woman was sedated to keep her in the
proper role of mother, homemaker, and wife. With antidepressants,
the depressed is uplifted and energized to maintain her productivity
in all her roles from wage earner to caretaker.
The medical treatment of depression was transformed by the social
changes in the labor force, essentially targeting female workers as the
main market for antidepressants. As the workplace incorporated women,
and the responsibilities of work was not just to perform job tasks, but also
to fulfi ll requirements that previously existed only in the social sphere,
the workplace had also to incorporate a particular form of subjectivity
embodied in the medicated depressed woman. As a result, depression
can be understood as productive for capital in two ways at once: fi rst,
through the pharmaceutical industry, in the production and consumption
of chemical treatments; and second, through the production of
new forms of subjectivity. I contend that the depressive, by caring for
the self through medication, has become the ideal productive worker
in the now feminized sphere of paid work.
This chapter argues that the relation between women, work, and
depression reveals the changing status of work; the process by which
women have been incorporated into wage labor; how labor has altered
to reflect feminine characteristics; and the form of self-governance
required to participate in today’s labor force. To this end, I briefly
discuss Michel Foucault’s (1990) concept of a “discipline society” and
Gilles Deleuze’s (1995) notion of a “control society” to understand the
historical shift in work from the production of goods to the production
of services. Next, the Marxist political theorist Antonio Negri (1992)
is deployed for his argument that explains how collective social moments
are subsumed by capital over time. The history of predominantly White
married women’s entrance into the labor force in the 1950s demonstrates
the process by which women and their qualities—including
depression—were subsumed into wage labor. These qualities are then
“put to work” and are now considered the primary requirements for
today’s employee as illustrated through a reading of the highly rated
reality television show The Apprentice. In today’s labor force, depression
encourages a form of self-governance that is the kernel of the
subjective experience of both men and women in contemporary professional
work.