Feminists have written extensively about women’s eating practices as they pertain to capitalist consumption and compulsory femininity; analyses abound of the cultural implications of anorexia, bulimia, dieting, fasting, or in other words, of women as consuming bodies. But little attention has been given to female bodies as sites of expulsion, or to the pervasive incidence of constipation or irritable bowel syndrome in women (to mention only the pathologised aspects of bowel habits), or to the way bowel ‘regularity’ becomes one of the means by which women exercise ‘control’ in their daily lives. In Part II: Micro-Peristalsis, I consider three case studies regarding how women manage and attach significance to their bowel habits, or, more generally, to the movement of substances through their bodies, even as their bodies are moved through, or positioned within, social, political, domestic, erotic and ideological systems. Each chapter includes a glimpse of the larger systems of movement within which a particular bio-medical case emerges – beginning in this chapter with the simultaneous cultural emphasis on medical treatments for constipation and streamlining industrial and domestic production in the early twentieth century. In each case, I examine how the woman in question is partnered with a representative of the medical establishment, and how knowledge is produced about her peristaltic system through a disciplinary unfolding of observation, interpretation, experimentation, subjection, resistance and the general ‘perpetual spirals of power and pleasure’ Foucault writes about as the ‘devices of sexual saturation’ that characterise biopolitics. A ‘sexuality of doctor and patient’ might be said to be operating in these case studies, but our emphasis will be placed rather on what we might call the ‘regularity of doctor and patient’ as the prime mover of the regularisation of the modern metabolic subject (Foucault, History of Sexuality, Part 1, 1990, 45–7).