the Female Body GOVERNING

“Doing What Comes Naturally . . .” 243
discourse that already has considerable currency in accounts of menstruation
and the menopause (Martin, 1989, 1990). The fear of a “poor
performance” led women to subject themselves to careful disciplinary
surveillance in the implementation of the IVF process, and particularly
in the administration of the hormonal drugs, on which the production
of multiple egg follicles is dependent:
Katy: Yeah, I’m very, very focused in that I’m disciplined but I have to
have everything just so. So, as long as everything’s just so. So the fact
that, you know, . . . getting the ampoule out and making sure there’s no
air in the needle, if a little spurt spurted out I’d be horrifi ed. Whereas,
subsequently, you know, they’d sort of you know, spurt out the end
and I said “Oh!” [horrifi ed] and they said, “It’s alright, they allow
factors of, you know, loss.” And I’d been doing everything sort of [all
laughing]—mustn’t lose anything. It might make all the difference.
Katy’s vigilance in relation to her meticulous preparation of the
hormonal drugs is self-deprecatingly told in terms of her lack of medical
knowledge about the built-in excess, but her story also highlights the seriousness
with which she approached her responsibilities in the treatment
process and particularly her attention to detail—a precision in which she
exceeds that of the medical professionals and that refl ects the “protoprofessionality”
of somatic individuality. Writing of the “body work” of
women at aerobics classes, Deborah Gimlin (2002) argues that rather
than aiming at a bodily ideal per se (for example, the “beautiful” body),
the women she observed sought to “neutralize the moral signifi cance of
fl awed bodies in favor of more positive indicators of strength, capability
and determination” (p. 145). The same kind of “body work” can be seen
in Katy’s case; unable to demonstrate the “ideal” reproductive body, she
instead demonstrates her commitment, skill, and self-discipline, which
show her to have both “done everything possible” to make the cycle
successful and as having many of the qualities that would have made her
a good mother. However, this need for absolute precision also refl ects the
responsibilities she feels—“it might make all the difference”—and while
claiming an expertise demonstrates the meeting of those responsibilities,
it also leaves the burden of responsibility unchallenged.
But for the women, the disciplining of the body to maximize the
chances of treatment success extended far beyond the specifi c requirements
of the injections into every aspect of their daily lives. In the
context of reproduction, this is utterly in keeping with bombarding
women with messages from both the alternative and conventional
medical fi elds about the importance of preconceptual and antenatal