the Female Body GOVERNING

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barbara mennel
engage in a broad reception of Foucault. They claim that especially
in Anglophone academia Foucauldian concepts, such as biopower,
discourse, and techniques of the self shape cultural, anthropological,
feminist, and minority studies, all of which the authors separate from
governmentality studies. 2
Governmentality, according to Foucault’s (1978/2000) lecture of the
same title, emerges with the development of the state. Foucault locates
a specifi c interest in “the government of oneself, that ritualization of
the problem of personal conduct” at the end of the eighteenth century
(p. 201). The discourse on governmentality resulted from a cross-over of
“the establishment of the great territorial, administrative, and colonial
states” and the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, which “raises the
issue of how one must be spiritually ruled” (p. 202). Foucault locates the
origin of the question “how to be ruled, how strictly, by whom, to what
end, by what methods” in the historical shift from the singularity of the
prince to a dispersion of power in the form of the state (p. 202). In the
model of governmentality, the family occupies a privileged site; thus
“three fundamental types of government [exist]: the art of self-government,
connected with morality; the art of properly governing a family,
which belongs to economy; and, fi nally, the science of ruling the state,
which concerns politics” (p. 206). Governmentality ensures continuity
between self, the family, and the state.
Mitchell Dean (1999) defi nes Foucault’s term governmentality as
“conduct of conduct,” which refers to “our behaviors, our actions and
even our comportment” (p. 10). Discussions about conduct, therefore,
according to Dean, “are almost invariably evaluative and normative,”
assuming that it is “possible to regulate and control that behavior
rationally, or at least deliberately, and that there are agents whose responsibility
it is here to ensure that regulation occurs” (p. 10). Different forms
of knowledge and expertise, such as medicine, criminology, social work,
therapy, and pedagogy produce “truth,” defi ne their objects of study,
and codify appropriate ways of dealing with them. According to Foucault
one cannot be free from governmentality even if one uses a discourse of
emancipation because it often implies “a normative framework, largely
inherited from certain forms of critical theory” (p. 35).
The prevalence of essays on nursing, female adolescent sex education,
genetics, and the legal discourse within the limited feminist reception
of governmentality bespeaks the applicability of governmentality to
precisely those constellations in which interests of the state are waged
in seemingly invisible ways on women and girls’ bodies and subjectivities
(see, e.g., Macleod & Durrheim, 2002; but also Fullagar, 2003; Ruhl,
1999; Weir & Habib, 1997). In these cases, the concept and approach