the Female Body GOVERNING

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lori reed
If the popular and psychological discourses surrounding Internet
addiction are approached through the lens of feminist and cultural
studies of science and technology, then the cultural formation of
computer technologies and defi nitions of “health” and “illness” must be
viewed as historically situated and as implicated in cultural, economic,
and political relationships. Foucault (1972, 1978, 1991) provides a useful
framework for analysis: He is interested in the historical production
of truth, and he works to understand the processes by which certain
concepts become accepted as true and the effects these truths have on
people’s lives. Foucault assumes that knowledge practices cannot exist
outside of power and politics, and he works to describe knowledge
practices that organize human behaviors into the “appropriate” and
“inappropriate,” “normal” and “abnormal.” Related feminist analyses
regarding the “sexual politics of sickness” such as defi nitions and diagnoses
of “hysteria” or brain disease (cf. Ehrenreich & English, 1979;
Gilman, 1899/1973) or addiction (Cole, 1998; Rapping, 1996; Schor &
Weed, 1993; Sedgwick, 1992) have also been examined as social products
of particular and historically situated gendered perspectives and
ideals. From these perspectives, denaturalizing such seemingly natural
and bounded truths is necessary by foregrounding the procedures,
assumptions, and institutional arrangements that produce such objects
of knowledge.
Thus, in the case of Internet addiction, it is important to look at the
knowledge practices surrounding the condition as being implicated in
how people negotiate the “conduct of conduct”—how people regulate
and govern others (and regulate and govern themselves) through the
production of truth (Rose, 1998, p. 11). Umiker-Sebeok (2001), for
example, draws on this framework to explore Internet addiction as
a disciplinary technology. She draws on psychological and popular
discourses surrounding Internet addiction, as well as the voices of
Internet addicts, to investigate critically how Internet addiction functions
to produce and regulate particular behaviors and selves (see also Reed,
2002). Toward similar ends, this chapter seeks to describe some of the
signifi cant ways in which Internet addiction functions as an apparatus
of governance by mapping the “correlation between fi elds of knowledge,
types of normativity, and forms of subjectivity” in a particular context
(Foucault quoted in Rose, 1998, p. 11). It pays particular attention
to the ways in which Internet addiction functions as a “technology
of gender” (Balsamo, 1996; de Lauretis, 1987), as an apparatus that
functions contextually toward the production, defi nition, negotiation,
and management of people’s developing relations with this new media
technology even while it produces and manages—or governs—related