The postmodern cultural clinic: Medicine, femininity and Foucault

The Postmodern Cultural Clinic: Medicine, Femininity and Foucault analyzes the increasing convergence of medicine and feminine aesthetics in contemporary culture. Chapter One explores Michel Foucault's historical analysis of modern medical epistemology in The Birth of the Clinic. Working from a critical feminist perspective, I argue that a new spatialization of the clinic is emerging in social discourses of medicine and femininity, which simultaneously expands and reinforces medical authority over the female body. This postmodern cultural clinic elides the constraints of femininity through a rhetoric of empowerment, identity and health. Medical knowledge blurs with normative femininity, and women's individual practices of an altered medical gaze produce disciplinary clinical space.

Three case studies illustrate this clinical discourse. Chapter Two analyzes medical protocols for the inpatient treatment of anorexia nervosa. Beyond their use in treatment, these protocols materialize an explicit territory of the “clinic,” in which traditional medical authority invokes a disciplinary Panopticon that seeks to return the individual to broader social panopticism. These treatment regimes produce a discursive “prison,” its anorexic “patient/prisoner” disciplined through medicalized mechanisms of surveillance and routinization.

Chapter Three examines Oprah Winfrey's multi-media campaign for women's embodied empowerment. Presented as a kind of contemporary “everywoman,” Winfrey carefully situates herself as an exemplar of weight loss and personal transformation, serving as proxy for her loyal viewers' own transformations. Winfrey's ongoing weight loss campaigns signify “fat” as unhealthy, a source of national shame, a symbol of trauma, and the veil women must lift in order to “live their best lives.”

Chapter Four analyzes the pro-anorexia movement, an internet-based movement that advocates anorexia as a legitimate lifestyle. Its discourse produces a virtual clinic by which the participants in the movement evade medical authority and usurp the medical gaze, at once deliberately manipulating medical discourse and falling prey to its regulatory impulses. With the anorexic body signifying disease and disgust, pro-anorexic exclusion from mainstream culture paradoxically reiterates this disdain; its participants enter the disembodied space of the internet to rid themselves of the bodies with which they struggle, but they ultimately fail to escape the prison of the unruly female body.