the Female Body GOVERNING

Gender, Pathology, Spectacle 67
in that it could only be an outside (and uncontrollable) force that could
drive Glenda away from her familial responsibilities. After all, she was
“happy” before the computer entered her life. Eventually, Glenda came
to realize that Jeepers was “not real,” not her “true” self, and as Glenda
is depicted performing the “appropriately” feminine substitute activity
of knitting, the segment concludes with commentary by reporter Keith
Morrison: “[Glenda] still sees the man she met online . . . [but they
have their problems]. . . .She’s gotten a job and lives alone. She still
has a computer. . . .But she works now and has little time to chat.” It is
reported that, eventually, Glenda saw the errors of her ways and was
brought back to “normality” to be, according to Morrison, “like the
vast majority of the over 10 million Americans online.” And Glenda’s
televised confession functions as part of the therapeutic return to her
“true” self, and as a “cautionary tale” to help other people avoid the
dangerous lure of the Internet. 1
If Glenda’s therapeutic recovery and eventual truth-telling of her
“cautionary tale” is considered through the lens of Foucault’s notion of
“confession,” we can explore Glenda’s story as a product and apparatus
of power, and as implicated in the broader governing of the social body.
Foucault (1978) describes Western society as “a singularly confessing
society” (p. 62). He posits that the modern “obligation to confess is now
related through so many different points, is so deeply ingrained in us,
that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us”
(p. 62). Foucault insists that truth is not simply “free” and waiting to be
released from repression but, rather, its production is thoroughly imbued
with relations of power. The practice of confession is an emblematic
example of this dynamic (p. 60). Yet, signifi cantly, the confession is not
coerced from a power located “above” but is formed from below “as an
obligatory act of speech. . . . And this discourse of truth fi nally takes
effect, not in the one who receives it, but in the one from whom it is
wrested” (p. 62). One confesses—or is forced to confess:
The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is
also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a
power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or
virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but
the authority who requires the confession, prescribes, and appreciates
it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and
reconcile; a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by the obstacles
and resistances it has had to surmount in order to be formulated;
and fi nally, a ritual in which the expression alone, independently of
its external consequences, produces intrinsic modifi cations in the