Governing the Female Body: Gender, Health, and Networks of Power

Introduction: Governing the Female Body Three Dimensions of Power

1 Introduction Governing the Female Body Three Dimensions of Power PAUL A SAUK KO & LOR I R EED Loughborough University and Independent Scholar In 1973 Boston Women’s Health Collective published the book Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book by and for Women, which was to become second-wave feminism’s health manifesto. The book articulated a women-centered health agenda, drawing on expert, scientific, and medical knowledge as well as personal experience. It had its origins in the collective’s workshops that applied the consciousness-raising method, which started from the premise that by exploring together personal experiences of oppression women could begin to see that their troubles were not personal issues but were shared by other women speaking about social subordination of women and requiring political responses. As discussed by Echols (1989) consciousness-raising was a method shared by many 1960s’ radical movements, such as the civil rights movement and the Guatemalan guerrillas, but the feminist version was unique in its aim to politicize intimate, embodied feelings and issues, such as sexuality, health, and family. The opening paragraphs of Our Bodies, Ourselves relate moments of recognition the women of the collective experienced when they had gone through the same embodied experiences, such as feeling that their first menstruation was scary, mysterious, and embarrassing (Boston Women’s Health Collective, 1973, p. 2). Overall, the second-wave feminist movement’s goal was to bring to the surface and challenge long-sedimented patriarchal myths, such as the association between menstruation and shame, which layered women’s sense of themselves. The aim was to pave the way for alternative or more emancipatory modes of relating to the female self, body, and health. Around the same time, Michel Foucault (1978) published the first volume of his History of Sexuality, offering a highly original theory on paula saukko & lori reed 2 the production of various “perverse” bodies, such as the masturbating child, hysterical woman, and the homosexual. The book offered a detailed account of how what had previously been considered aberrant behaviors were constituted as “specimens” by the early modern sciences of psychiatry and sexology. The conditions, such as masturbation, homosexuality , and female hysteria, were positioned in scientific classificatory tableaux and associated with detailed lists of symptoms, photographs, and methods of intervention. These diagnostic categories isolated and intensified certain behaviors not only as objects of diagnosis and often cruel treatments, but also as sources of pleasures, identification, and emotional and political investments. What united the feminist politics and Foucault’s oeuvre was a strong liberatory agenda that was in keeping with the radicalism of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Both the feminist health collective and Foucault explored and attacked the way in which the bodies of women, gay men, and children were inscribed as always potentially eruptive and pathological by expert gazes of medicine and science, accounting for the sense of shame and mystery that they associated with their bodies. The feminists and Foucault parted company, however, in their understanding of emancipation. The Boston Women’s Health Collective (1973) set out to discover and construct a “more whole” or “more self-confident” and “stronger” femininity (p. 3). On the contrary, Foucault was circumspect about any attempt to recuperate a “more whole” identity, arguing such a project was always bound to recreate a dogma of “true self,” which deciphers and classifies certain behaviors and dispositions as the true and the norm, and others as false and wrong (Foucault, 1984; also Sawicki, 1992). The title of this book, Governing the Female Body, refers to both the feminist and Foucauldian critical traditions of analyzing discourses that have constituted female bodies and selves. The term governance, derived from Foucault’s (1991) middle works, both bridges and clarifies these two traditions. Governance has three dimensions that usefully highlight and trouble classical ways of understanding the relation between power, gender, and the body. The first and most obvious dimension is the reference to political power or the art of governing nations and populations . One of the red threads running through Foucault’s work is an examination of the link between political governance of populations and the intimate governance of bodies and selves, which is crystallized in the feminist slogan “personal is political.” Thus, as King discusses in this volume, the self-identification of women with breast cancer as “survivors,” who empower themselves by taking charge of their health and self, not only articulates an attempt to deconstruct the stigma of Introduction...