the Female Body GOVERNING

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lori reed
person who articulates it: it exonerates, redeems, and purifi es him;
it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and promises him
salvation. (p. 62)
Cole (1998) specifi cally addresses confession in the context of 12-step
recovery programs as she argues that the recovering addict turns over his
or her authority to a higher power, thus acknowledging the lack of free
will and moral failure (p. 269). Yet, rather than view Glenda’s situation
as either the acquisition or lack of free will, addressing the particular
activation of Glenda’s participation toward her own subjectifi cation
and toward the production and formation of particular legitimations of
computer use—toward a particular (and interested) Internet “temperance—is
useful.” (See Miller, 1996, for a discussion of cultural citizenship
and the “tempered” self.) Foucault (1978) outlines several delineations
through which the ritual of confession is imbued with relations of power,
including “through a clinical codifi cation of the inducement to speak,”
“through the method of interpretation,” and “through the medicalization
of the effects of confession” (pp. 65–67). In Glenda it becomes
apparent how the inducement to speak, the subjection to an authoritative
interpretant, and the medicalization of the effects of confession (translation
of computer use through the med-psych apparatus of addiction)
functions toward managing individual and social bodies. Glenda is
both physically and internally separated—and separates herself—from
others (“normal” computer users, “healthy” women) even while her new
knowledge about her own irresponsibility and deviation from her true
self heightens her susceptibility to a prescriptive normativity. Glenda’s
“crisis” of identity is further reinforced through a close-up of a computer
screen which displays the question, “Who Am I?” She is encouraged to
draw on an authoritative psychological vocabulary of which she is both
the subject and the object. (See Nadeson, 1997, for a discussion of
these issues surrounding personality testing.) The addiction apparatus
successfully transforms Glenda—and Glenda transforms herself—into a
normal computer user and healthy woman/mother: a responsible cyborg
citizen amid the threat of myriad alternatives.
At the same time, Glenda’s narrative represents and manages a
broader cultural crisis surrounding issues of “presence” as has been
activated by technological change, and functions toward the production
and eventually “stabilized” technohabitus that includes particularly structured
relation among computers, bodies, identities, and selves. Stone
(1996) and Derrida (1993), respectively, posit that “technosociality,”
and “the technological condition,” including chemical and medical
(re)constitutions of bodies, computer technologies, and formations of