the Female Body GOVERNING

Biopolitical Media 199
of family planning. Both cases illustrate the centrality of population
control to PCI’s strategy. Malthusian fears about overpopulation have
been closely associated with the invention and circulation of biopower
(Foucault, 1990, p. 105). Foucault (1990) argues that the nineteenthcentury
discourses about the “Malthusian couple” helped to put sexuality
at the center of modern biopolitics. More recently, Greene (1999) has
argued that the location and construction of the Malthusian couple
in the Third World as a threat to the global security of the First World
was implicated in the invention and composition of the “population
apparatus,” a global network of power dedicated to improving individual,
national, and global welfare by lowering fertility rates.
Of course, alternative social imaginaries exist alongside and apart from
the Malthusian modern. One such alternative is the “feminist modern”
(Greene, 1999, 2000). The feminist modern emerged on the terrain
of international population policy as a counterforce to the Malthusian
modern. It is the result of a new consensus put together at the 1994 International
Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) shifting
priorities away from demographic quotas and timetables to the empowerment
of women. Its primary difference with the Malthusian modern
is that it takes women’s empowerment, health education, and women’s
rights as the primary building blocks toward a more sustainable vision of
development. What marks the feminist modern as modern is the growing
emphasis on women as subjects, or active participants, who emerge,
often with the help of experts, as capable of challenging cultural norms
and practices that limit the choices women need to make to improve
their quality of life. While resisting Malthusian forms of modernity, the
feminist modern increasingly relies on a Western emphasis on individual
action (Wilkins, 1999, p. 63). In her case study of Tanzania’s emphasis
on women’s and girls’ education as a development strategy, Vavrus (2003)
points out that “women’s choices about childbearing, reproductive health,
and environmental conservation are shaped by social and politicaleconomic
considerations that the independent fi gure of the feminist
modern does not take into account” (p. 41).
Biopolitical media industries, such as PCI, are able to bridge Malthusian
and feminist imaginations by linking rights talk with the “neutrality”
of medical discourses. However, like its development communication
predecessors, such a link often ignores a systematic analysis associated
with the structural conditions of women. For example, the rhetoric of
“choice” implied by the concept of gender equality PCI employed is
often restricted to control over family composition—family size and the
spacing of births—rather than “choice” about health care, food, and
shelter for self and family. According to Bandarage (1997):