the Female Body GOVERNING

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body and gender may be technologically open to reconfiguration, it
appears that they are “vigilantly guarded” by a culture that is highly
invested in a particularly gendered “proper order of things” (p. 10).
Research on the construction of technosocial selves, both online
and offline, has been key toward the formation of digital and virtual
cultures, and toward an understanding of the ways in which computer
networks and the virtual socialities they embody function to reveal the
interworkings and internalizations of “appropriate” sociality in physical
space, be it in relation to gender, family, or other constitutions of
bodies and selves.
This chapter has delineated some ways through which notions of
“appropriate” and “inappropriate” communication, interactivity, sociality,
bodies, and selves are struggled over through defi nitions of proper
uses of new media, specifi cally related to treatments for various forms
of online addiction. Most certainly, the formation and mobilization of
“pathological” Internet use, including “addiction” is tied to cultural
notions surrounding the organization and assemblage of bodies and
identities. Indeed, both Glenda Farrell and Sandra Hacker, each in
their own specifi c ways, push the boundaries and exceed “acceptable”
limits of body, gender, and self. Similar to historical notions of women’s
excess such as “hysteria” or “madness,” the concept of Internet addiction
functions as an apparatus or technology of gender that collects
and organizes such excess, and reassembles and reorganizes social
practices in line with (a binary and) culturally acceptable structure of
gender/femininity. Glenda Farrell functions as an exemplary subject as
she readily speaks of her gender transgressions in terms of computer use,
and her computer use through the addiction apparatus. Ultimately, she
constitutes her transgressions as inappropriate acts of irresponsibility
and lapses in judgment. She accepts a singular self (Jeepers was “not
real”) and that Glenda’s life prior to her Internet addiction is/was her
real life. Glenda expresses regret for her “antifamily” practices as she
self-mobilizes the addiction apparatus as a means to gain (and to speak)
her “freedom” to choose her own behavior and to return to her “true”
self. Sandra Hacker, on the other hand, is an “unruly” subject who
rejects the addiction apparatus as an organizing device and explanatory
framework for her gender transgressions. She refuses the “addict”
designation and the notion that she is an “unhealthy” woman. Instead,
she argues that her behavior be viewed as commentary on the gendered
division of domestic labor. As Rapping (1996) argues regarding the
politics of “recovery,” translating Hacker’s behavior into the discourse
on addiction both defuses the social commentary and delegitimizes her
oppositional voice.