the Female Body GOVERNING

Gender, Pathology, Spectacle 65
are projected onto new technologies that alter, or seem to alter,” existing
social organization. . . . “Efforts are launched to restore social equilibrium,
and these efforts have signifi cant social risks” (p. 5). She further
explains that the history of electronic media can be seen as a “series
of arenas for negotiating issues crucial to the conduct of social life,
among them, who is inside and outside, who may speak, who may not,
and who has authority and may be believed” (p. 4). Not insignifi cantly,
the popular acceptance of the Internet and the World Wide Web was
contemporaneous with the “culture of recovery” (Rapping, 1996) in the
1990s, and women’s love for the machine was said to, in some cases, turn
to obsession, and several cases of female child neglect due to Internet
addiction received wide public attention. In addition to the proliferation
of newspaper reports, television profi les about Internet addiction and
Internet-induced family and gender disruptions appeared on shows such
as Dateline NBC (1997), Inside Edition (1996), The Maury Povich Show
(1998), and NBC Nightly News (1997), among others. Psychological and
psychiatric discourses continued with the warnings fi rst seen throughout
the 1970s and 1980s, that home computers constituted a looming threat
to the family and, as mentioned, it was declared in the 1990s that women
were particularly “at risk” for computer addiction (Snodgrass, 1997).
And while men were and still are at times designated as computer or
Internet addicts, focusing on the specifi city of the designation as it
forms in relation to women it is useful because the intelligibility of the
designation depends on and reproduces a normative femininity as it
governs and regulates the female body.
Glenda’s Story: The Talking Cure
and Technologies of Presence
These processes and dynamics regarding contests over proper Internet
use, gender, and family practices, and Internet addiction as both an
apparatus through which a new, normative media “technohabitus” is
produced and managed through the governing or regulation of the
nuclear family are illustrated in two cases of the condition as they were
chronicled separately on Dateline NBC (1997) and the Maury Povich Show
(1998). The fi rst segment, from Dateline NBC, presents a report on the
recovery of Glenda Farrell, a self-described Internet addict. The segment
begins by describing the ominous threat of an emerging epidemic:
Drugs, alcohol, sex. As we enter the twenty-fi rst century we’re getting a
little better at recognizing and treating addictions that have haunted
humanity for centuries. But with this new age also comes a strange new