the Female Body GOVERNING

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kristin a. swenson
the initiatory rituals of the factory and the offi ce” (p. 14–15). On the
other hand, the “continuous change in the organization of labor has
subsumed the complex of inclinations, dispositions, emotions, vices, and
virtues that mature precisely in a socialization outside of the workplace”
(p. 15, emphasis in original). In this shift from a disciplinary society to
a control society, the site of the workplace no longer “molds” the body
into performance; rather, the workplace itself has mutated to absorb the
affectations of social relationships that mature prior to work.
The subjectivity of today’s wage earner is constituted by the ambivalence
generated through the blurred spheres of work and life, and thus
by the deteriorating ability of work to ground the subject. Because
work now occupies the entire fi eld of social relations and because
the subjectivities that are productive for capital are characteristically
feminine, then the sicknesses associated with femininity are absorbed by
capital as well. Stated simply, those aspects of life that have traditionally
been experienced outside and prior to work are now a requirement for
work itself. The relation between women, depression, antidepressant
medications, and work reveal tensions between the dominant form of
subjectivity—the fl exible feminized worker—and the form of capitalist
organization.
Jonathan Michel Metzl (2003) explores the proliferation of psychotropic
medication and its relation to traditional gender roles in print
advertisements and psychological journals from 1955 through 2002.
He aptly notes, “The process whereby—unlike most other types of
medications—psychotropic medications become connected with both
curing disease and maintaining certain specifi c notions of gender
roles is a mechanism of action that evolved over the latter half of
the twentieth century” (p. 12). Signifi cantly, as the number of women
entering the labor force after World War II increased, psychotropic drugs
entered common cultural parlance. Metzl argues that with the shift
toward psychotropic drugs and away from psychoanalysis, “women were
assumed to be the source of an epidemic of ‘cultural anxiety,’” and in
psychotropic drugs such as Miltown, “culture found its restorative cure”
(p. 27). With psychotropics women were kept content and in their place
as the traditional mother and spouse regardless of their new subject
position as wage earner.
In the 1960s and 1970s, as women were gaining more power in the
workforce and fought to alter the patriarchal social structure, psychotropic
pharmaceuticals were advertised to calm down angry and irate
feminists who would rock the social boat demanding equality in wages
and opportunity. A 1965 ad in the American Journal of Psychiatry offered
Valium as a panacea for women who were tense and frustrated, “With