the Female Body GOVERNING

Gender, Pathology, Spectacle 77
subject. (p. 40; see also Figert, 1996, for a discussion of the DSM
and premenstrual syndrome; Kirk and Kutchins, 1992, for a general
discussion of the politics of the DSM and surrounding the DSM and
homosexuality)
As Stone argues, this notion of a location technology is useful toward
analyzing these two cases of Internet addiction because they link to
cultural struggles surrounding defi nitions of a proper single physical
body, a proper single awareness of self, proper geography through
techniques of psychological testing, and classifi cation within a “grid of
coordinates,” all of which become internalized by and through a specifi c
technohabitus even as they participate in the formation of that same
technohabitus. And, again, this “location” is internalized and therefore
mobile and functions as one instance of the materialization of the new
media technohabitus as particular modes of technological being, habits
and lifestyles become assembled, naturalized, and internalized.
Conclusion: On Healthy Computer Use as a Technology of Gender,
Communication, Family, and Home
In conclusion, the discourses and practices around computer addiction
can be seen as the structuring structure of sociotechnological relations
that become organized, stabilized, and internalized as the “proper” set
of dispositions and relations between humans and new technological
prostheses, of body, self, and identities. In this sense, Internet addiction
functions toward the organization of a specifi c technohabitus through
its articulation to this extended history surrounding the “hystericization”
of female bodies, women’s historical struggles and strategies to
elude authorities (psychomedical, discursive, and material), and related
prescriptions and containments of gendered bodies and behaviors.
Thus, amid myriad possibilities, as Balsamo (1996), Nakamura
(1999)—and the cases of Sandra Hacker and Glenda Farrell described
here—demonstrate, cyberspace and other technosocial environments
are not simply spaces of unlimited—or, rather, unorganized—formations.
Rather, many familiar social codes have been, and are in the
process of becoming renaturalized in technosocial spaces. In turn,
new media technological practices become normalized through
their produced attachment to existing cultural values and practices.
Nakamura, for example, suggests that, while escaping racial categories
and boundaries is technologically possible, the culturally intelligible
body online still remains fixed in a modern logic of racial boundaries.
Balsamo (1996) similarly argues that even while the “natural” human