the Female Body GOVERNING

74
lori reed
Hacker: Not . . . not really because he was on it, you know, all the
time, too. . . . And, I didn’t, you know, say he was addicted.
Povich: So in a way, you’re in denial?
Hacker: I wouldn’t say that.
When Hacker refuses to subject herself to the position of “addict,”
Povich continues to impose the addiction discourse onto translations of
Hacker’s computer use. When she further rejects this interpretation, he
delves deeper into the discourse to delegitimize her resistance, “So in a
way, you’re in denial?” At this point, within the discourse on addiction,
her further rejection of the designation becomes further evidence of
her “addiction” and need for authoritative intervention.
As the discussion continues, a frustrated Povich, who becomes
impatient with Hacker’s refusal to speak her “addiction,” turns to the
teleprompter to preview the next segments of the show. Hacker’s story
is only briefly addressed again when Povich asks psychological expert,
Dr. Greenfield, for a diagnosis of Hacker’s condition. But Greenfield
abstains from coming to the conclusion that Hacker is clinically
addicted, “I don’t know whether she’s addicted. And based on her
story today, I would say it’s inconclusive, but certainly, based on the
media’s coverage, I would say she is.” Later, however, Greenfield offers
that the Internet is “a very powerful, powerful medium. And everybody
that gets online reports this phenomenon of being overwhelmed by it
and taken over by it.” In this instance, through Povich’s prodding, the
audience’s reactions, the expert diagnoses, Hacker is not encouraged
to be the subject of her own perceptions. Rather, following Sedgwick’s
(1992) analysis of the politics of addiction and confession culture, it
can be said that Hacker “is installed as the proper object of compulsory
institutional disciplines, legal and medical, which, without actually
being able to do anything to ‘help’ her, nonetheless presume to know
her better than she can know herself” (p. 582). The addiction discourse
offers Hacker a vehicle for self-knowledge and self-transformation, a
“symbolic and normative vocabulary for identifying and transcending
individual ‘failing’” (Nadeson, 1997, p. 208). Hacker refuses to be
spoken of in this way. Yet, her willful rejection of the “addict” designation,
her option to be nonaddicted becomes suspect and is mobilized
as further “proof” of her pathology. As Nadeson describes the process
of subjectification, “the individual’s capacity for maintaining and
achieving ‘health’ is viewed as being structured around his or her use
of the discourse and techniques of psychology for self-knowledge and
self-transformation.” Furthermore, the discursive equation between
disease and psychological ‘pathology’ introduces a moral compulsion