the Female Body GOVERNING

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to intervention and change. The professions, in turn, depend on the
desire to invent, explain, and solve social problems, a demand that not
only supplies privileged forms of expertise with grant dollars but guides
the formation of disciplinary and professional problematics. What takes
place in this reciprocal relation between expertise and governance is
the composition of “associations formed between entities constituted
as ‘political’ and the projects, plans and practices of those authorities—economic,
legal, spiritual, medical, technical—who endeavor to
administer the lives of others in the light of conceptions of what is good,
healthy, normal, virtuous, effi cient or profi table” (Rose & Miller, 1992,
p. 175). The success or failure of professional expertise to garner status
as a legitimate knowledge, that is, knowledge capable of speaking truth,
increasingly requires the ability of experts to enter into alliances closely
associated with activities and agencies of political governance.
Communication scholarship oriented toward investigating the effectiveness
of mass mediated public health campaigns partakes in a growing
network of organizations (some closer than others to the state) that are
becoming increasingly reliant on communicative processes as a fi eld and
method for regulating behavior. In the case of entertainment-education,
a trend is increasingly visible about what kinds of communicative
research and expertise will be given priority. As McKinley and Jensen
(2003) note, the impact studies supporting the ability of entertainmenteducation
to change social behavior often reveal negligible “descriptions
of media environments,” and “very little attention has been devoted
to the ethnographic context of the audiences” (p. 185). The growing
interactive dependence of public health/development campaigns
on the success or failure of communication reveals the need for the
description, assessment, and evaluation of these programs to “change
reality.” McKinley and Jensen (2003) describe the media effects research
underwriting entertainment-education as exhibiting the “tenacity of the
modernization paradigm lurking beneath the surface of research that
aims to measure specifi c effects as a result of exogamous, strategically
launched development communication interventions” (pp. 185–186).
Hence, seeing communication scholars such as Everett Rogers (1973),
who were once associated with communicating family planning strategies
in the 1970s, today evaluating PCI’s health communication campaigns
in the 1990s (Vaughn & Rogers, 2000), is not surprising. Some forms of
communicative expertise are given priority and opportunity due to their
ability to translate events, people, and motivations into information that
is “stable, mobile, comparable and combinable” (Rose & Miller, 1992,
p. 185). In the fi eld of entertainment-education, forms of communicative
expertise are increasingly necessary to justify the continued funding of