the Female Body GOVERNING

Gender, Pathology, Spectacle 79
Together, the cases of Glenda Farrell and Sandra Hacker offer a useful
illustration of technologies as “crystallizations of social networks” (Stone,
1996). At the same time, and relatedly, they demonstrate how the dual
process of subjectifi cation operates in two important ways to enhance
the governability of populations:
First, they operated as dividing practices which partition the individual
internally or separate him or her from others. Second, they operated
as a technique of subjectifi cation by transforming individuals into
particular kinds of subjects by heightening their existential insecurity
and their sensitivity to normativity. In their efforts to secure their
identities, individuals drew on the very same psychological vocabulary
that effected their objectifi cation. (Nadeson, 1997, p. 202)
Insofar as IAD and PIU are actively mobilized toward reordering
individual and social arrangements, they can be viewed as a normalizing
practices that advocate, prescribe, and even activate particular notions of
“normal” and “healthy” gender, sexuality, and family. The (attempted)
restoration of “health” and “freedom from addiction/compulsion”
is also the (attempted) restoration of “appropriate” femininity and
“appropriate” motherhood. Rose (1995) describes this as the process
of relocating questions about the conduct of life within the fi eld of
expertise such that a specifi c knowledge is activated through the subject
as a seemingly autonomous quest for the true self—it appears as a
matter of freedom. Thus, the diagnosis and identifi cation of Internet
addiction, importantly, cannot be viewed as a mere technical byproduct
or result of scientifi cally pure psychological discourses on addiction, or
as simply a means of regaining lost control or of attaining “freedom” over
one’s life. Rather, the medicalization of Internet use and the culturally
specifi c defi nitions and formations of Internet addiction are signifi cantly
implicated in competing, contested, and political notions of gender,
familial, and technological practices. An exploration into gendered
dynamics surrounding the defi nition and management of computer
and Internet addiction make present the governing logics surrounding
the forming technohabitus surrounding computer networks and the
organization of their uses and users.
Marvin (1988) and Stone (1996) envision the history of technology
as a complex assemblage of sociotechnological forces are useful for
understanding “technologies as crystallizations of social networks [with]
the technologies and the networks co-creating each other in an overlapping
multiplicity of complex interactions” (Stone, p. 88) In this way,
technologies can be seen “simultaneously [as] causes of and responses to