the Female Body GOVERNING

“It’s Down To You” 25
in particular kinds of self-management practices to “hold” or contain
the uncertainty and contradiction that governs their encounter and
experience of this technique. Franklin (1997) aligns this with the “work
of femininity” more generally, which involves “consumption, bodywork,
emotional and psychological work” (p. 125). This “labor of femininity”
extends to women’s magazine culture where women were primarily urged
to work on relationships through an injunction that privileged their
engagement in practices of self-monitoring, evaluation, scrutiny and
bodily, emotional, and/or psychological transformation to achieve certain
desired ends. This project of self-transformation was also subsumed
within a consumer discourse where diet programs, fi tness, cosmetics,
health-oriented foods, cosmetic surgery, and other body techniques were
promoted and valorized through a vocabulary of choice that addressed the
(female) reader as being able to achieve success and happiness through
her choice among a range of options and preferences.
Strategies of Psychological Survival
As we have seen, what governs the kinds of discourses that frame the
concerns of femininity within women’s magazines is their inherently
dilemmatic nature. Rather than simply competing with each other,
discourses are dialogic, speaking to each other most visibly at their
moments of disavowal or denial. The defensive organization of the
interconnections between those discourses that govern the production
of modern femininities also reveals something about the embodiment
of these discourses in actual women’s lives. Franklin (1997) examines
the strategies and practices of “psychological preparedness,” which
women adopt to endure the irresolution produced by the experience
of IVF: the endless cycle of hope and failure that characterizes many
women’s experience (p. 161). As she argues, “to negotiate a successful
passage through IVF requires physical, emotional, and psychological
self-management” (p. 192).
I want to contrast this study of the embodied experience of IVF with
a study of how educated working-class women endure and survive the
contradictory ways they are positioned as subjects across a range of practices
in which they are subjects; educational, familial, scientifi c, popular,
and so forth (Walkerdine, 1996). What characterizes the emotional landscape
and psychological economies of these women who have entered
typically middle-class professions through educational opportunities are
a range of irreconcilable dilemmas and ambivalences.
Walkerdine (1996) characterizes this experience as one of being
positioned as the “object of hopelessly contradictory discourses.” This