the Female Body GOVERNING

Gender, Pathology, Spectacle 75
for the individual to take care of himself or herself. Indeed, “a failure
of the self to take care of itself constitutes irrationality and a moral
failure” (p. 210). Thus, Hacker’s refusal to become an “addict” is even
more problematic in that it suggests that she “willfully” neglected her
children. In turn, this willful act reveals the “work” necessary toward
the attainment of “natural” gender and familial arrangements.
The spectacle of Sandra Hacker at the moment of confession (internalization
of the discourse) and resistance is a useful illustration of
what Stone (1996) describes as the violence waged at the formation
of subjectivity. Stone describes a courtroom audience as intent on the
moment of rupture and the revelation of the construction of reality
during arguments about the rape of a female, Sara, who was diagnosed
with multiple personality disorder. Like Sara, Sandra Hacker is a
liminal figure, a “technosocial actant” who struggles within a historically
specific sociotechnological matrix. Hacker’s struggle functions
at an individual level yet it is emblematic of a broader struggle of
the time surrounding the assemblage and organization of new media
into the existing (albeit continually forming) social context. At the
same time, the spectacle-ization of Hacker’s Internet use placed her
story into the position of cultural symbol through which the broader
technohabitus became negotiated, structured, and formed (even while
it also structured Hacker’s push into the limelight). Also like Sara,
Hacker disrupts boundaries of body, gender, location, and family. In
Hacker’s case, the practices of norm and prohibition function both
spatially and internally as she exceeds both geographical and subjective
limits. Sandra Hacker left her family in Cincinnati for a trip to Chicago.
The question of her physical location is directly connected to the question
of her psychological location or normality. Where was she? Where
should she have been? Stone discusses subjectivity as tied to being in
place, wherein “the individual societal actor becomes fixed in respect to
geographical coordinates” (p. 91). Social order, then, requires spatial
accountability—knowing where the subject under the law is. In other
words, “accountability traditionally referred to the physical body and
most visibly took the form of laws that fixed the physical body within
a juridical field whose fiduciary characteristics were precisely determined—the
census, the introduction of street addresses, passports,
telephone numbers—the invention and deployment of documentations
of citizenship in all their forms, which is to say, fine-tuning surveillance
and control in the interests of producing a more ‘stable,’ manageable
citizen” (Stone, p. 90). In this way, both Sandra Hacker and Glenda
Farrell, each differently challenge notions of the body, self, and place
because they are “unstable”—they move physically and virtually in such