CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland

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

Organiser: Paula Saukko

Reed, Lori (University of Rhode Island, USA) WOMEN WHO LOVE THEIR COMPUTERS TOO MUCH: THERAPEUTIC PRACTICE AND TECHNOLOGIES OF WORKPLACE EFFICIENCY
This presentation traces the historical and gendered formation of "pathological" computer use in the workplace. It draws on theories and methodologies from critical discourse analysis to investigate how the management of women's relationships to computer technologies in the workplace has been spoken through discourses on health and illness and has functioned toward the establishment a productive female workforce. The paper describes the management of "pathological" computer fear in the 1970-80s and then discusses contemporary diagnoses of "pathological" computer use in the workplace. In particular, the paper explores how, in work settings, "Internet Addiction" is often used synonymously with "Internet Misuse" and how it is increasingly used as rationale for the institution of monitoring and management of employee computer use. Yet, since employee monitoring is said to increase "technostress" and to foster a sort of technophobia, the final section focuses on this tension between the corporate need to allow and encourage (productive) computer use and the need to limit and direct that use. In particular, the paper explores specific health-based interventions deployed to direct and regulate female computer use even as these interventions function to produce and regulate a normative femininity and the female body.

Saukko, Paula (University of Leicester, United Kingdom) FROM AUTONOMY TO FLEXIBILITY: KAREN CARPENTER, PRINCESS DIANA, EATING DISORDERS, AND 'HEALTHY' FEMALE SELF
While most research on eating disorders examines normative discourses, such as beauty ideals, which inform or cause these conditions, this presentation discusses the way in which discussions on eating disorders themselves suggest a normative healthy female self--as opposed to the disordered anorexic or bulimic self. Based on an analysis of the popular iconography on Karen Carpenter and Princess Diana, the arguably most famous women to have had eating disorders, the presentation analyses how they set forth an ideal female identity, exploring its historical and political underpinnings. The high-profile lives and deaths of Carpenter and Princess Diana have provoked heated social debate on gender, class, and politics. Carpenter and her soft-rock music have been eulogised as the epitome of a dreamy, wholesome, femininity, and deplored as an embodiment of an infantilised woman and annihilating, conservative, family-values. Princess Diana has been adored both as the royal virgin bride and as the outspoken divorcee and outcast, both in relation to the royal family and in relation to people of colour, gays, and people with AIDS that were associated with her life, image and her charitable activities. The paper investigates the popular and intellectual discussions on Carpenter as embodying and succumbing to an ideal femininity, and Princess Diana as an inventive 'survivor' of a turbulent life, arguing they point to a historical shift from an ideal 'autonomous' toward an ideal 'flexible' self. It examines the connections between these ideals and the social polarization of post-Sixties' neo-conservative America and the fluidity of Nineties' New Labour Britain, and evaluates their contradictory implications, both in terms of offering models of female behavior, and of legitimating particular social and political regimes.

Turtiainen, Jussi (University of Tampere, Finland) SHAPING THE FEMALE BODY IN PHYSICAL EDUCATION
Physical education is the site for shaping, normalizing and reconstructing bodies through various cultural practices, educational settings and discursive formations. Departing form Foucault's conceptualizations on the body, discipline and normalization, I explore the ways in which the female body is portrayed in Finnish physical education texts and analyze the underlying assumptions of health, gender and the body. Based on more recent research on the body, health and gender, I extend Foucault's notions in two directions. First, I will expand the analysis to include the gendered demarcation of the body. Second, I develop the idea where the body is seen as a self-project, and bodily identity is reconstituted through reflexivity and an internalized and medicalized gaze of the self. It should be noted, however, that physical education texts do not produce one hegemonic depiction of the female body, but merely constitute a site for negotiating definitions of the female body and the ideal 'healthy' body.

Basu, Srimati (DePauw University, USA) SHADOWS IN THE COURTROOM: THE INTERPELLATION OF GENDER & AUTHORITY IN THE INDIAN HIGHER COURTS
This presentation examines debates in the area of feminist jurisprudence, including the significance of legal reform in postcolonial contexts. Based primarily on readings of family law cases from Indian appellate courts, it shows some ways in which judicial authority invents and incorporates gendered notions of family and law, e.g. the meanings of "healthy" marriage, family, class, national identity and religious identity, by drawing upon and reinventing "authoritative" bodies of knowledge. Women's legal claims appear to be most favorably received when they match dominant definitions of gender, although these can be trumped by the ways in which class (and therefore opportunities) are constructed. Religion based rights often get tied to national political negotiations. Legal solutions appear to be both powerful instruments for achieving greater gender equity as well as subversive sites for recuperation of gender, class and religious hegemonies in the guise of protection and liberation. The slippage between the intent and effects of both "progressive" and "reactionary" legislation indicates that feminist theorists should focus both on discursive effects of gender and on power relations in the legal realm.