the Female Body GOVERNING

“Doing What Comes Naturally . . .” 241
woman, although she does have female counterparts in other contexts;
the “scalpel slave” or “surgery junkie” of cosmetic surgery is another
rhetorical incarnation of the same irrational excess (Davis, 1995), as
is the kleptomaniac “lady” shopper (Ableson, 2000), the shopaholic,
or the “obsessive” dieter. These are all sites that are constructed as
constituting normative femininity—beauty practices, shopping, weight
control—but that require a comparable balancing act of doing enough,
but not too much. Writing of the feminized domain of shopping, Rachel
Bowlby (2000) argues that periodic madness in relation to consumption—for
example, in the sales—is constructed as a facet of normal
femininity, in contrast with the stability of male sanity and reason
(p. 124). This parallels the understanding of the female hormonally
regulated body as cyclically (dis)ordered, in comparison with male
hormonal stability (Oudshoorn, 1994, p. 146). This contrast between
the disordered normality of femininity and the rational normality of
masculinity was duplicated explicitly in the accounts via a discourse
of the hormonal reproductive drive:
Martin: I think it’s been a bit of a burning desire for Nancy to have
a child. But if I’m honest with myself, I’m very much . . . I was very
much, if it happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.
Brian: Why go with all that stress? Be happy with what you’ve got,
which was always what I said. Obviously, you have to, erm, put that
against the maternal instincts, and so on. . . .
Women are conventionally understood as hormonally driven
(Oudshoorn, 1994), both toward reproduction and toward erratic and
irrational behavior; in both of these examples, the male partners are
witnesses to the natural drives, not subject to them. The hormonal
discourse provides a strongly normalizing justifi cation for the use of
technology for reproduction because it retains the dominance of the
natural in the reproductive endeavor with technology simply serving
as a “helping hand.” In Lisa’s case, her doctor also confi rmed the
irrepressibility of the maternal drive:
Lisa: I remember that fi rst meeting, he [the consultant] was very
sympathetic, and he said, “I do understand that secondary infertility
is actually more distressing than being infertile, because your body
is screaming out, because the hormones have already been through
the process of being pregnant and having a child. Your body wants
to do it again.