the Female Body GOVERNING

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samantha king
Thus, from former President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 Task Force on
Private Sector Initiatives, established to develop, support, and promote
private sector leadership in community development and social service,
to former President George H. W. Bush’s Points of Light initiative, to
Bill Clinton’s 1997 Summit on America’s Future held to solicit individual
and corporate generosity as a “complement” to welfare reform
legislation, to former President George W. Bush’s faith-based initiatives,
four successive federal administrations have sought to establish the
organizational and subjective conditions through which to reshape
relations between the state and the individual. They have done this not
simply by rolling back the public welfare system with the hope that the
charitable impulses of citizens and corporations will fl ourish, but by
helping to create techniques, strategies, and programs—frequently in
partnership with nonprofi t or business entities—aimed at producing
volunteer and philanthropist citizens.
Despite the association between volunteerism and freedom in U.S.
culture and the pervasive view that the social state has stifled the innate
generosity of the American people, the turn toward volunteerism and
philanthropy does not mark a radical turn away either from government
or from the role of the state in governing as the rhetoric of those who
celebrate the “end of big government” suggests. Rather, it marks a
shift toward a different form of governing and the emergence of an
alternatively constituted state. In this context, this chapter highlights
how government, or the “conduct of conduct” to use Foucault’s formulation,
is dispersed throughout the social body, rather than resting solely
or even primarily with the state. This is not to trivialize the role of
the state in governing, particularly in a conjuncture that has seen
an “intensification, acceleration, and integration of governing strategies
under a state of emergency, or permanent war” (Bratich, Packer,
& McCarthy, 2003, p. 17), but rather to show how functions that we
might traditionally associate with the state, or connections between
the governor and the governed, occur at innumerable decentered,
dispersed, and often private or commercial sites within the social
body. The turn to volunteerism and philanthropy can thus be read
as an effect of the desire to “govern at a distance” that theorists such
as Nikolas Rose (1996) have identified as a central characteristic of
neoliberal thought. Institutions, programs, and techniques designed
to encourage volunteerism and philanthropy, for example, are mechanisms
of governance that have varying degrees of autonomization from
the state. Nonetheless, these networks and techniques are frequently
established through alliances with the state, and, even when operating
in deeply privatized settings (a National Football League advertising