the Female Body GOVERNING

Biopolitical Media 195
ated communication research” (p. 186). As such, different research
methodologies and theoretical literatures are necessary. However,
our point is that while it is an important political struggle to justify
different ways of “being in the true” within the association of experts
and governance, we should not avoid commenting on the will to govern
that permeates much of health communication research. From the
standpoint of governance, recognizing how organizations such as PCI
build associations and constituencies made up of cultural workers, media
professionals, and communication experts is, perhaps, more important.
In other words, the formative and evaluative research methodologies
PCI used belong to the area of media production and PCI should be
studied as a media institution. Such a perspective reveals how the values,
motivations, and the instrumental goals of reproductive health and
gender equality rely on the invention of biopolitical media industries.
Biopolitical Media and the Need for Audiences
Our argument is not that PCI’s soap operas promote bad ideological
representations of health and women. Our argument is that health
communication is increasingly associated with the tasks of governing the
reproductive health of women. Moreover, for communication to govern
requires the incorporation of communicative genres and expertise into
institutional partnerships between NGOs such as PCI and the state. We
are less concerned with how soap operas are decoded by an audience.
In fact, research on soap operas in the Middle East suggests soaps can
provide rhetorical and cultural resources for resisting conservative
assumptions about the role of women (Abu-Lughod, 2004). So too
might PCI claim such an effect because it designs its soaps to express
norms of reproductive health consistent with the international human
rights treaties signed by the countries where the soaps are broadcast.
This paper is agnostic on the ideological message being transmitted
and decoded. However, we are interested in what the production story
tells us about the biopolitical governance of female bodies. The argument
we pursue is that female bodies are increasingly governed in and
through their attachment to biopolitical media industries. The fi rst step
in our argument concerns the difference between commercial media
and biopolitical media and the “new international division of cultural
labor” (NIDCL).
The NIDCL refers to the possibility that cultural industries, such as
manufacturing, might relocate beyond the borders of the First World.
For Miller (1998), the NIDCL describes how “this could happen at the
level of textual production . . . or in such areas as marketing, information