Kalindi Vora
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816693948
- eISBN:
- 9781452950570
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816693948.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
From call centers, overseas domestic labor, and customer care to human organ selling, gestational surrogacy, and knowledge work, such as software programming, life itself is channeled across the ...
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From call centers, overseas domestic labor, and customer care to human organ selling, gestational surrogacy, and knowledge work, such as software programming, life itself is channeled across the globe from one population to another. In Life Support, Kalindi Vora demonstrates how biological bodies become a new kind of global biocapital. Vora examines how forms of labor serve to support life in the United States at the expense of the lives of people in India. She exposes how even seemingly inalienable aspects of human life such as care, love, and trust—and biological bodies and organs—are commodifiable entities as well as components essential to contemporary capitalism. As with earlier modes of accumulation, this new global economy has come to rely on the reproduction of life for expansion. Human bodies and subjects are playing a role similar to that of land and natural resource dispossession in the period of capitalist growth during European territorial colonialism. Indeed, the rapid pace at which scientific knowledge of biology and genetics has accelerated has opened up the human body as an extended site for annexation, harvest, dispossession, and production.Less
From call centers, overseas domestic labor, and customer care to human organ selling, gestational surrogacy, and knowledge work, such as software programming, life itself is channeled across the globe from one population to another. In Life Support, Kalindi Vora demonstrates how biological bodies become a new kind of global biocapital. Vora examines how forms of labor serve to support life in the United States at the expense of the lives of people in India. She exposes how even seemingly inalienable aspects of human life such as care, love, and trust—and biological bodies and organs—are commodifiable entities as well as components essential to contemporary capitalism. As with earlier modes of accumulation, this new global economy has come to rely on the reproduction of life for expansion. Human bodies and subjects are playing a role similar to that of land and natural resource dispossession in the period of capitalist growth during European territorial colonialism. Indeed, the rapid pace at which scientific knowledge of biology and genetics has accelerated has opened up the human body as an extended site for annexation, harvest, dispossession, and production.
Clara Pinto-Correia
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780231170949
- eISBN:
- 9780231544580
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231170949.003.0006
- Subject:
- Biology, Bioethics
We have invented new types of mothering and are just beginning to feel their effects on society. Surrogacy has a long history and as a means of employment, it has opened up many unquieting biological ...
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We have invented new types of mothering and are just beginning to feel their effects on society. Surrogacy has a long history and as a means of employment, it has opened up many unquieting biological and legal questions. Similarly, egg donation and post-menstrual pregnancies enable people to become biological mothers when such options had been closed until a few years ago. The new technology of egg freezing promises a life of freedom to young single women. These technologies are popularized and romanticized, but they are not without significant perils.Less
We have invented new types of mothering and are just beginning to feel their effects on society. Surrogacy has a long history and as a means of employment, it has opened up many unquieting biological and legal questions. Similarly, egg donation and post-menstrual pregnancies enable people to become biological mothers when such options had been closed until a few years ago. The new technology of egg freezing promises a life of freedom to young single women. These technologies are popularized and romanticized, but they are not without significant perils.
John David Penniman
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780300222760
- eISBN:
- 9780300228007
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300222760.003.0008
- Subject:
- Religion, History of Christianity
This Conclusion explores how the imperative “to eat well” has been an undercurrent, a connecting thread, linking disparate arguments about food and formation within the figures and texts explored. ...
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This Conclusion explores how the imperative “to eat well” has been an undercurrent, a connecting thread, linking disparate arguments about food and formation within the figures and texts explored. Gastronomy inevitably carries with it a set of social, physiological, and intellectual valences regarding the power of nourishment in human development. The simplicity of the phrase “eat well” obscures the complex of ideologies in which a community gathers and to which its individuals are held accountable. The phrase thus evokes a process of growth and development, at once essentially materialistic and profoundly symbolic. What else is gastronomy, then, but a kind of socializing curriculum, a system for incorporating ambient cultural values into one’s own person? A meal materializes the porous boundary between our individual bodies and the social body in which we participate. Drawing upon theorists such as Donna Haraway, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, this conclusion considers whether the trope of milk and solid food might be wrested from its traditional and more restrictive use in regulating bodies and minds. Is it possible to imagine a new Pauline gastronomy that focuses not on power exerted but rather on the vulnerability shared between eater and feeder?Less
This Conclusion explores how the imperative “to eat well” has been an undercurrent, a connecting thread, linking disparate arguments about food and formation within the figures and texts explored. Gastronomy inevitably carries with it a set of social, physiological, and intellectual valences regarding the power of nourishment in human development. The simplicity of the phrase “eat well” obscures the complex of ideologies in which a community gathers and to which its individuals are held accountable. The phrase thus evokes a process of growth and development, at once essentially materialistic and profoundly symbolic. What else is gastronomy, then, but a kind of socializing curriculum, a system for incorporating ambient cultural values into one’s own person? A meal materializes the porous boundary between our individual bodies and the social body in which we participate. Drawing upon theorists such as Donna Haraway, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, this conclusion considers whether the trope of milk and solid food might be wrested from its traditional and more restrictive use in regulating bodies and minds. Is it possible to imagine a new Pauline gastronomy that focuses not on power exerted but rather on the vulnerability shared between eater and feeder?
Bruno Perreau and Deke Dusinberre
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780262027229
- eISBN:
- 9780262323383
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262027229.003.0002
- Subject:
- Political Science, Public Policy
Chapter two covers French parliamentary debate since 1945, demonstrating the great consistency of issues despite sweeping institutional changes, whether they concern the situation of single mothers, ...
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Chapter two covers French parliamentary debate since 1945, demonstrating the great consistency of issues despite sweeping institutional changes, whether they concern the situation of single mothers, the adoption of children into families with existing legitimate children, the methods for monitoring adoption applicants, and so on. The only issues that have arisen more recently on the political scene, in the 1980s and ‘90s, are intercountry adoption and the nature of the difference between the sexes. This chapter shows that intercountry adoptions never became the object of intense controversy because they were swiftly defined by international treaties as constituting subsidiary kinship in the absence of other solutions in the children’s home countries. In contrast, the issue of the difference between the sexes within a parenting couple sparked a lively polemic, one that has not totally vanished with the legalization of gay marriage and joint adoption by homosexual couples in May 2013.Less
Chapter two covers French parliamentary debate since 1945, demonstrating the great consistency of issues despite sweeping institutional changes, whether they concern the situation of single mothers, the adoption of children into families with existing legitimate children, the methods for monitoring adoption applicants, and so on. The only issues that have arisen more recently on the political scene, in the 1980s and ‘90s, are intercountry adoption and the nature of the difference between the sexes. This chapter shows that intercountry adoptions never became the object of intense controversy because they were swiftly defined by international treaties as constituting subsidiary kinship in the absence of other solutions in the children’s home countries. In contrast, the issue of the difference between the sexes within a parenting couple sparked a lively polemic, one that has not totally vanished with the legalization of gay marriage and joint adoption by homosexual couples in May 2013.
Anne C. Dailey
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780300188837
- eISBN:
- 9780300190083
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300188837.003.0006
- Subject:
- Law, Criminal Law and Criminology
The prevailing model of contract law presumes that fully informed decision-makers exercise free and voluntary choices to further their conscious preferences and goals. The model makes sense in the ...
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The prevailing model of contract law presumes that fully informed decision-makers exercise free and voluntary choices to further their conscious preferences and goals. The model makes sense in the context of commercial relationships. But family contracts—prenuptial agreements, separation agreements, adoption agreements, surrogacy contracts, and contracts between intimate partners—are another matter. Psychoanalysis invites us to examine the ways in which the prevailing free choice model fails to acknowledge the troubling influence of unconscious factors on the formation and breach of intimate contracts. As this chapter explains, psychoanalysis uncovers the subjective drama of intimate contracts: the role of fantasy and memory in constructing present reality; the need to replay and to master old traumas; the ambivalences, conflicts, and paradoxes of unconscious life. Psychological phenomena in the form of unconscious fantasy, transference, repression, attachment, regression, splitting, and resistance can color, distort, and undermine the parties’ decisions to enter into, and later abide by, intimate contracts in ways that go well beyond the ordinary commercial setting. By studying prenuptial agreements and surrogacy contracts carefully, this chapter sheds new light on the ways law can and should take psychoanalytic insights into account when regulating the formation and enforcement of these intimate agreements.Less
The prevailing model of contract law presumes that fully informed decision-makers exercise free and voluntary choices to further their conscious preferences and goals. The model makes sense in the context of commercial relationships. But family contracts—prenuptial agreements, separation agreements, adoption agreements, surrogacy contracts, and contracts between intimate partners—are another matter. Psychoanalysis invites us to examine the ways in which the prevailing free choice model fails to acknowledge the troubling influence of unconscious factors on the formation and breach of intimate contracts. As this chapter explains, psychoanalysis uncovers the subjective drama of intimate contracts: the role of fantasy and memory in constructing present reality; the need to replay and to master old traumas; the ambivalences, conflicts, and paradoxes of unconscious life. Psychological phenomena in the form of unconscious fantasy, transference, repression, attachment, regression, splitting, and resistance can color, distort, and undermine the parties’ decisions to enter into, and later abide by, intimate contracts in ways that go well beyond the ordinary commercial setting. By studying prenuptial agreements and surrogacy contracts carefully, this chapter sheds new light on the ways law can and should take psychoanalytic insights into account when regulating the formation and enforcement of these intimate agreements.
Kelly Oliver
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780823251087
- eISBN:
- 9780823253036
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823251087.003.0007
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Moral Philosophy
I take up Derrida's metaphorical question, “Does one invent the child±” (from the mid-1980s). Given recent advancements in genetic engineering and cloning, this question takes on a more literal hue. ...
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I take up Derrida's metaphorical question, “Does one invent the child±” (from the mid-1980s). Given recent advancements in genetic engineering and cloning, this question takes on a more literal hue. So-called designer babies threaten to turn parents into patents in ways that assume we can control reproduction. Derrida's “deconstructive genealogy” presents a challenge to the notion of parent as patent and suggests that even in the face of changing technologies, we cannot control the chance elements of reproduction, even within the most reliable machines. Here, I turn the notions of parent and patent against themselves, which opens up alternative meanings of both, and again enables one nail to take out another. Furthermore, technologies that raise anew the question of maternity merely highlight the ways in which both maternity and paternity are always uncertain, matters of chance, and assume a problematic notion of testimony. In the end, I argue that current debates in bioethics over genetic engineering assume that we can master reproduction through technologies (whether we approve of that or not) and disavow chance, which is always operative in the machinery of life, particularly in the reproduction of life.Less
I take up Derrida's metaphorical question, “Does one invent the child±” (from the mid-1980s). Given recent advancements in genetic engineering and cloning, this question takes on a more literal hue. So-called designer babies threaten to turn parents into patents in ways that assume we can control reproduction. Derrida's “deconstructive genealogy” presents a challenge to the notion of parent as patent and suggests that even in the face of changing technologies, we cannot control the chance elements of reproduction, even within the most reliable machines. Here, I turn the notions of parent and patent against themselves, which opens up alternative meanings of both, and again enables one nail to take out another. Furthermore, technologies that raise anew the question of maternity merely highlight the ways in which both maternity and paternity are always uncertain, matters of chance, and assume a problematic notion of testimony. In the end, I argue that current debates in bioethics over genetic engineering assume that we can master reproduction through technologies (whether we approve of that or not) and disavow chance, which is always operative in the machinery of life, particularly in the reproduction of life.
Kalindi Vora
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816693948
- eISBN:
- 9781452950570
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816693948.003.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
Life Support argues that any analysis of biocapital must engage its roots in colonial labor allocation as a project of the racialization and gendering of labor. Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock ...
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Life Support argues that any analysis of biocapital must engage its roots in colonial labor allocation as a project of the racialization and gendering of labor. Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock define biocapital as “a form of extraction that involves isolating and mobilizing the primary reproductive agency of specific body parts.” I argue that this form of accumulation and production can be seen in its historical context of colonialism and its antecedents as a system of continuing the transmission of what I call vital energy—the substance of activity that produces life (though often deemed reproductive)—from areas of life depletion to areas of life enrichment. Thus, rather than focusing only on biological science and biotechnology as sites for producing value, this study looks for the social logics within biological and labor markets for evidence of how capitalist accumulation continues to rely on reproductivity. This approach to biocapital reads narrative accounts of outsourcing as transmitting vital energy from producers to consumers, which is evidenced in the latter’s improved ability to thrive and perpetuate individual and community life.Less
Life Support argues that any analysis of biocapital must engage its roots in colonial labor allocation as a project of the racialization and gendering of labor. Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock define biocapital as “a form of extraction that involves isolating and mobilizing the primary reproductive agency of specific body parts.” I argue that this form of accumulation and production can be seen in its historical context of colonialism and its antecedents as a system of continuing the transmission of what I call vital energy—the substance of activity that produces life (though often deemed reproductive)—from areas of life depletion to areas of life enrichment. Thus, rather than focusing only on biological science and biotechnology as sites for producing value, this study looks for the social logics within biological and labor markets for evidence of how capitalist accumulation continues to rely on reproductivity. This approach to biocapital reads narrative accounts of outsourcing as transmitting vital energy from producers to consumers, which is evidenced in the latter’s improved ability to thrive and perpetuate individual and community life.
Kalindi Vora
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816693948
- eISBN:
- 9781452950570
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816693948.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
“Limits of Labor: Affect and the Biological in Transnational Surrogacy and Service Work” looks at how affective and biological labor such as that found in call center and surrogacy work are indices ...
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“Limits of Labor: Affect and the Biological in Transnational Surrogacy and Service Work” looks at how affective and biological labor such as that found in call center and surrogacy work are indices of new forms of exploitation and accumulation within neoliberal globalization, but also rearticulate a longer historical colonial division of labor.Less
“Limits of Labor: Affect and the Biological in Transnational Surrogacy and Service Work” looks at how affective and biological labor such as that found in call center and surrogacy work are indices of new forms of exploitation and accumulation within neoliberal globalization, but also rearticulate a longer historical colonial division of labor.
Kalindi Vora
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816693948
- eISBN:
- 9781452950570
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816693948.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This chapter uses ethnographic narratives and Arjun Raina’s dramatic monologue A Terrible Beauty is Born to look at how the technologies and training that create the call center agent as a subject of ...
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This chapter uses ethnographic narratives and Arjun Raina’s dramatic monologue A Terrible Beauty is Born to look at how the technologies and training that create the call center agent as a subject of labor and capital also produce an artificial surplus of affective commodities that can then be transmitted elsewhere through the labor of the call center worker.Less
This chapter uses ethnographic narratives and Arjun Raina’s dramatic monologue A Terrible Beauty is Born to look at how the technologies and training that create the call center agent as a subject of labor and capital also produce an artificial surplus of affective commodities that can then be transmitted elsewhere through the labor of the call center worker.
Kalindi Vora
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816693948
- eISBN:
- 9781452950570
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816693948.003.0004
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This chapter uses original ethnography to examine how information technology as an industry depends upon a reterritorializing of imperial labor legacies despite the assumed globality and ...
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This chapter uses original ethnography to examine how information technology as an industry depends upon a reterritorializing of imperial labor legacies despite the assumed globality and connectedness of high tech. Racial and national difference merge to influence the kind of work available for high-tech workers in Bangalore, making India largely illegible as a site of innovative and globally-connected products.Less
This chapter uses original ethnography to examine how information technology as an industry depends upon a reterritorializing of imperial labor legacies despite the assumed globality and connectedness of high tech. Racial and national difference merge to influence the kind of work available for high-tech workers in Bangalore, making India largely illegible as a site of innovative and globally-connected products.
Kalindi Vora
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816693948
- eISBN:
- 9781452950570
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816693948.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This chapter draws from original ethnographic research conducted in 2008 at a fertility clinic in Northern India to examine how Assisted Reproductive Technologies expand options for childless couples ...
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This chapter draws from original ethnographic research conducted in 2008 at a fertility clinic in Northern India to examine how Assisted Reproductive Technologies expand options for childless couples with financial resources to pursue low-cost surrogacy and for laboring-class Indian women to sell the use of their bodies to gestate these children for higher wages than they could otherwise earn. At the same time, IVF technologies expand the increasing number of commodity forms of human life and human vital energy, they allow the Indian surrogate’s womb and its biological functions to be abstracted from the rest of her life and made excessive to her non-reproductive existence.Less
This chapter draws from original ethnographic research conducted in 2008 at a fertility clinic in Northern India to examine how Assisted Reproductive Technologies expand options for childless couples with financial resources to pursue low-cost surrogacy and for laboring-class Indian women to sell the use of their bodies to gestate these children for higher wages than they could otherwise earn. At the same time, IVF technologies expand the increasing number of commodity forms of human life and human vital energy, they allow the Indian surrogate’s womb and its biological functions to be abstracted from the rest of her life and made excessive to her non-reproductive existence.
Sarojini Nadimpally and Vrinda Marwah
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- July 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780199482160
- eISBN:
- 9780199097746
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780199482160.003.0010
- Subject:
- Sociology, Health, Illness, and Medicine, Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
Medical research on human bodies for the purpose of drug development, and the use of technology to assist human reproduction are not new phenomena. However, the marriage of medical technology with ...
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Medical research on human bodies for the purpose of drug development, and the use of technology to assist human reproduction are not new phenomena. However, the marriage of medical technology with commercial interest in a globalising world has led to a reinvention of the status of the body as a resource. Today, the global traffic in body parts and their renting and selling is unprecedented. This is throwing up new challenges, especially ethical and legal challenges. Clinical trials and surrogacy are two sites where these challenges are playing out. This chapter explores themes that emerge from the work of Sama, a Delhi-based resource group working on issues of gender and public health through research, advocacy, and inter-movement dialogue.Less
Medical research on human bodies for the purpose of drug development, and the use of technology to assist human reproduction are not new phenomena. However, the marriage of medical technology with commercial interest in a globalising world has led to a reinvention of the status of the body as a resource. Today, the global traffic in body parts and their renting and selling is unprecedented. This is throwing up new challenges, especially ethical and legal challenges. Clinical trials and surrogacy are two sites where these challenges are playing out. This chapter explores themes that emerge from the work of Sama, a Delhi-based resource group working on issues of gender and public health through research, advocacy, and inter-movement dialogue.