the Female Body GOVERNING

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lisa blackman
in particular kinds of linear ways. These narratives identify and contain
threats produced on the basis of a fantasy of reestablishing (national)
security and boundaries. This narrative structure guides Hollywood’s
circulation of numerous fi lms, such as Independence Day, which have dealt
with threats to national or even global security through unwelcome or
uncontrollable threats such as asteroids or nonworldly visitors such as
aliens. Although we may be more willing to accept the role of fi gurative
language such as metaphor in the production of cultural narratives,
Stacey suggests that scientifi c narratives similarly draw on metaphors and
fi gurative language, but through particular rhetorical tropes and strategies
are able to cover their fi gurative tracks. As Foucault (1972) and other
analysts of the production of scientifi c knowledge, such as Bruno Latour
(1987) have cogently shown, science uses a variety of tricks to make and
produce knowledge that “functions in truth.” 5 Stacey develops the analysis
of fi gurative language by analyzing the symbiotic relation between the
kinds of narratives that structure “cancer stories,” biomedical discourse,
and the narratives and practices valorized by the specifi c self-help and
self-health discourses that organize “alternative” cancer care, such as the
well-known Bristol Cancer Help Centre in the United Kingdom.
This attention to the interdependence between individual practices
and narratives and those that organize the global and cultural imaginary
goes some way in exploring the more subjective dimensions of media and
cultural forms and how they work in conjunction with scientifi c narratives
and discourses. This is a pressing concern for media and cultural theorists
interested in the thorny question of how to analyze the relation between
media and cultural forms, and subjectivity and identity. However, the
previous discussion of global self-health, although foregrounding embodiment
still relies on the body as constructed within text and does not
engage with how actual subjects inhabit the kinds of positions constructed
within these texts and practices. The assumption made is that they are
inhabited with relative ease due to the way in which these narratives are
established as true and normative through their insertion into a range of
cultural and scientifi c practices that shape our subjectivities. There is a
discourse or social determinism in this kind of work that plagues the more
constructionist approaches to identity and subjectivity that tend to characterize
the discipline of cultural studies. Fuss (1989) and Riley (1983)
have both made calls for a move beyond the essentialist/constructionist
dualism when considering the social and psychological signifi cance of
discursive formations. Many think that the move to consider embodiment
to be a way forward and out of this dualism (cf. Blackman, 2001), but as
we have seen with the previous discussion, often very generalist claims
are made to account for the possible subjective commitment to certain