the Female Body GOVERNING

Biopolitical Media 187
Rogers 2000; Vaughn et al., 2000). A program carefully researched and
designed to promote the values of gender equality, sexual responsibility,
and environmental protection, Twende na Wakati became an important
case study in the emerging fi eld of entertainment-education (Keyser,
2000) and the template of PCI’s approach to mass media public health
communication.
This chapter investigates the media production practices of PCI in
order to inquire into the role of mass mediated public health campaigns
in governing reproductive health. The network of professional expertise
represented by PCI media productions often seem “exempt from a
critical interrogation of their motives because their communication
campaigns are aimed at increasing the social good” (McKinley & Jensen,
2003, p. 183). Perhaps what prevents the critical challenge from gaining
traction is the idea that a critical intervention must challenge the
motives of the participants in these communication campaigns. Rather
than focusing on motives, then, our critical intervention challenges the
methods by which PCI produces soap operas. We interrogate PCI’s media
production practices to highlight how the governing of female bodies
takes place in and through their attachment to specifi c communicative
networks populated by a shifting set of cultural industries, workers,
experts, and genres. Specifi cally, we demonstrate that the governance
of women’s reproductive and sexual health relies on the ability of biopolitical
media industries to transform women into media audiences.
Entertainment Education and the Genres of Governance
The idea that mass mediated communication may function as an instrument
of economic and social development has been around for some
time. Daniel Lerner’s (1958) Passing of the Traditional Society: Modernizing
the Middle East was an early effort to forge an explicit link between
communication research and development strategies. Followed by Wilbur
Schramm’s (1964) Mass Media and National Development, they conceived
the mass media as an instrument for the diffusion of development
decisions from centralized governing structures to the people “on the
ground” Also, in the 1960s Everett Rogers (1962) emphasized the role
of the media in the diffusion of innovations necessary to jump-start
the change from a traditional society to a modern one. For Lerner,
Schramm, and Rogers the goals of development were to be promoted
through the interaction of mass media and literacy to generate support
for innovations such as birth control technologies associated with
modernization. Unfortunately, the optimism associated with the link
between development and communication in the 1960s ran into diffi -