the Female Body GOVERNING

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in mechanical labor as a means to forget one’s self and therefore,
one’s depression. In a control society, little difference exists between
the relationships at work and those in the social sphere. The ability to
escape one’s depression becomes nearly impossible. No longer is refuge
found in forgetting that one is depressed. Through the management
of depression, one is never able to forget that one is depressed. In
both social and work relations, the process of continually monitoring,
managing, altering, and becoming that constitutes the medicated
depressed person’s relationship with the self, mirroring the process
in which contemporary life is lived. 14
Notes
The author is grateful to Brynnar Swenson for the enthusiastic and ongoing
discussion of the ideas presented in this chapter. The author also wishes to thank
Lori Reed and Kirt H. Wilson for their comments on earlier versions of this
chapter.
1. The Prozac Web site, www.prozac.com, expresses these symptoms as a sign
of depression. This chapter is in no way a critique of those of us who have
experienced depression nor a critique of those who have used medication to
ease our depression. This chapter seeks to understand a relationship between
women, work, and depression.
2. According to the DSM-IV-TR (2000) “Major Depressive Disorder (Single
or Recurrent) is twice as common in adolescent and adult females as in
adolescent and adult males” (p. 372). “Women are two to three times” more
likely to experience dysthymic disorder, the most common and pervasive form
of depression, than men (p. 378).
3. Importantly, other female maladies including bulimia, panic disorders, and
irritable bowl syndrome are also considered affective disorders and seem
to suggest that the female body is dysfunctional at the level of its affect.
Recognizing the other common female affective disorders is illustrative of the
point that the affect I am speaking of is not reducible to emotion, but rather
is “the transduction of asignifying velocities across bodies” (Griggers, 1997,
p. 111). Brian Massumi (1997), in his article “The Autonomy of Affect,” notes
that affect differs from emotion and that “affect is intensity,” and “follows
different logics and pertain to different orders” (p. 221) than emotion.
4. Women have always been a part of the labor force. Black and poor women have
always worked, in both paid and unpaid labor, and have long experienced the
exploitation of capital. Middle-class women have been historically called on as
a paid labor force during times of economic and national crisis such as during
the Great Depression and World War II. The signifi cance of the post-World
War II labor force is that married and predominately White women were still
needed to meet the demands of the economic recovery.
5. I thank Brynnar Swenson for pointing me to this distinction.
6. “Subtle revolution” is a term appropriated from Ralph Smith’s (1979) book,
The Subtle Revolution: Women at Work.
7. For an account of why economics and gender exist in “different economies,”
and why Marxism is structurally blind to the economy of gender relations,
see Gail Rubin’s (1975) work, “The Traffi c in Women: Notes on the ‘Political
Economy’ of Sex.”