the Female Body GOVERNING

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paula saukko
such as the elderly. A long story evolved on the list when the father,
who had thrombophilia, of one of the frequent participants had heart
surgery in Austria:
My dad (FVL+; 69 years old) will undergo triple bypass surgery
tomorrow in Austria. He is on Coumadin and was not able to go down
enough with his INR, so I guess they will give him vit K shot, and he
also has other health problems.
The father developed complications, and the participant fl ew to be
by his side for weeks to double-check that he received adequate care,
remembering her own days at the hospital:
As to being your own advocate: with my DVTs, I learned fast to watch
out for myself! When the IV was almost empty, I would call the nurse
(quite often they would tell me it wouldn’t really hurt me if it ran
dry . . .), I would watch and make sure I got the meds I was supposed
to get, and then I would remind the nurses when it was time for them,
because quite often they would forget.
Overall, the list was rife with advice about how to take care of family
health matters in terms of insurance, vacationing (taking care of long
fl ights, avoiding high altitudes), breaking the news of a genetic susceptibility
to family members, and diets to eat in general and in particular
when taking Coumadin.
The way in which the participants on the list, most of them women,
worked on seeking information, managing everyday life and health
care and giving emotional support for their family members and to
other participants on the list can be interpreted in two ways. First, the
exchanges provided the women an opportunity to both get practical
information about how to best care for their children and other relatives
in relation to thrombophilia; the list also offered emotional support and
encouragement for the women in their everyday care work. As observed
by others (Drentea & Moren-Cross, 2005) online support groups may
provide mothers, often isolated in their caring, “social capital” understood
in terms of both instrumental and emotional support. Second,
however, the group also bolstered an ethos of caring, which consolidated
the idea that health and well-being is the responsibility of the private
sphere of selfl ess female nurturance. The ethos of both preventive
genomics and online health groups is that individuals should take a
greater responsibility for their health, which not only democraticizes
medicine but also shifts the burden for public health on private indi-