Commodifying Bodies

Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Loïc Wacquant
Published in Association With Theory Culture Society
Commodifying Bodies
April 2003 | 200 pages | Sage UK
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eBook
ISBN: 9781446236079
Available from January 0001
Hardcover
ISBN: 9780761940333
Available from January 0001

Description

Increasingly the body is a possession that does not belong to us. It is bought and sold, bartered and stolen, marketed wholesale or in parts. The professions - especially reproductive medicine, transplant surgery, and bioethics but also journalism and other cultural specialists - have been pliant partners in this accelerating commodification of live and dead human organisms. Under the guise of healing or research, they have contributed to a new 'ethic of parts' for which the divisible body is severed from the self, torn from the social fabric, and thrust into commercial transactions -- as organs, secretions, reproductive capacities, and tissues -- responding to the dictates of an incipiently global marketplace.

Breaking with established approaches which prioritize the body as 'text', the chapters in this book examine not only images of the body-turned-merchandise but actually existing organisms considered at once as material entities, semi-magical tokens, symbolic vectors and founts of lived experience. The topics covered range from the cultural disposal and media treatment of corpses, the biopolitics of cells, sperm banks and eugenics, to the international trafficking of kidneys, the development of 'transplant tourism', to the idioms of corporeal exploitation among prizefighters as a limiting case of fleshly commodity.

This insightful and arresting volume combines perspectives from anthropology, law, medicine, and sociology to offer compelling analyses of the concrete ways in which the body is made into a commodity and how its marketization in turn remakes social relations and cultural meanings.

Contents

Bodies for Sale - Whole or in Parts

Bodies for Sale - Whole or in Parts

The Other Kidney

  • Biopolitics Beyond Recognition

Commodity Fetishism in Organs Trafficking

Commodity Fetishism in Organs Trafficking

The Alienation of Body Tissues and the Biopolitics of Immortalized Cell Lines

The Alienation of Body Tissues and the Biopolitics of Immortalized Cell Lines

The Immigrating Body and the Body Politic

  • The 'The Yeminite Children Affair' and Body Commodification in Israel

The Cremated Catholic

  • The Ends of a Deceased Guatemalan

Bodies That Don't Matter

  • Death and Dereliction in Chicago

Semen as Gift, Semen as Goods

  • Reproductive Workers and The Market in Altruism

Excess Scarcity and Desire among Drug-Using Sex Workers

Excess Scarcity and Desire among Drug-Using Sex Workers

Whores, Slaves and Stallions

  • Languages of Exlpoitation and Accommodation among Professional Boxers

Description

Increasingly the body is a possession that does not belong to us. It is bought and sold, bartered and stolen, marketed wholesale or in parts. The professions - especially reproductive medicine, transplant surgery, and bioethics but also journalism and other cultural specialists - have been pliant partners in this accelerating commodification of live and dead human organisms. Under the guise of healing or research, they have contributed to a new 'ethic of parts' for which the divisible body is severed from the self, torn from the social fabric, and thrust into commercial transactions -- as organs, secretions, reproductive capacities, and tissues -- responding to the dictates of an incipiently global marketplace.

Breaking with established approaches which prioritize the body as 'text', the chapters in this book examine not only images of the body-turned-merchandise but actually existing organisms considered at once as material entities, semi-magical tokens, symbolic vectors and founts of lived experience. The topics covered range from the cultural disposal and media treatment of corpses, the biopolitics of cells, sperm banks and eugenics, to the international trafficking of kidneys, the development of 'transplant tourism', to the idioms of corporeal exploitation among prizefighters as a limiting case of fleshly commodity.

This insightful and arresting volume combines perspectives from anthropology, law, medicine, and sociology to offer compelling analyses of the concrete ways in which the body is made into a commodity and how its marketization in turn remakes social relations and cultural meanings.

Contents

Bodies for Sale - Whole or in Parts

Bodies for Sale - Whole or in Parts

The Other Kidney

  • Biopolitics Beyond Recognition

Commodity Fetishism in Organs Trafficking

Commodity Fetishism in Organs Trafficking

The Alienation of Body Tissues and the Biopolitics of Immortalized Cell Lines

The Alienation of Body Tissues and the Biopolitics of Immortalized Cell Lines

The Immigrating Body and the Body Politic

  • The 'The Yeminite Children Affair' and Body Commodification in Israel

The Cremated Catholic

  • The Ends of a Deceased Guatemalan

Bodies That Don't Matter

  • Death and Dereliction in Chicago

Semen as Gift, Semen as Goods

  • Reproductive Workers and The Market in Altruism

Excess Scarcity and Desire among Drug-Using Sex Workers

Excess Scarcity and Desire among Drug-Using Sex Workers

Whores, Slaves and Stallions

  • Languages of Exlpoitation and Accommodation among Professional Boxers

April 2003 | 200 pages | Sage UK

Format Published Date ISBN Price
Hardcover 31/03/2026 9780761940333 $249.00
Paperback 31/03/2026 9780761940340 $94.00
180 Day Ebook 28/03/2023 9781446236079 $59.00
Lifetime 28/03/2023 9781446236079 $85.00

Increasingly the body is a possession that does not belong to us. It is bought and sold, bartered and stolen, marketed wholesale or in parts. The professions - especially reproductive medicine, transplant surgery, and bioethics but also journalism and other cultural specialists - have been pliant partners in this accelerating commodification of live and dead human organisms. Under the guise of healing or research, they have contributed to a new 'ethic of parts' for which the divisible body is severed from the self, torn from the social fabric, and thrust into commercial transactions -- as organs, secretions, reproductive capacities, and tissues -- responding to the dictates of an incipiently global marketplace.

Breaking with established approaches which prioritize the body as 'text', the chapters in this book examine not only images of the body-turned-merchandise but actually existing organisms considered at once as material entities, semi-magical tokens, symbolic vectors and founts of lived experience. The topics covered range from the cultural disposal and media treatment of corpses, the biopolitics of cells, sperm banks and eugenics, to the international trafficking of kidneys, the development of 'transplant tourism', to the idioms of corporeal exploitation among prizefighters as a limiting case of fleshly commodity.

This insightful and arresting volume combines perspectives from anthropology, law, medicine, and sociology to offer compelling analyses of the concrete ways in which the body is made into a commodity and how its marketization in turn remakes social relations and cultural meanings.


Table Of Contents:

  • Bodies for Sale - Whole or in Parts
  • The Other Kidney
  • Biopolitics Beyond Recognition
  • Commodity Fetishism in Organs Trafficking
  • The Alienation of Body Tissues and the Biopolitics of Immortalized Cell Lines
  • The Immigrating Body and the Body Politic
  • The 'The Yeminite Children Affair' and Body Commodification in Israel
  • The Cremated Catholic
  • The Ends of a Deceased Guatemalan
  • Bodies That Don't Matter
  • Death and Dereliction in Chicago
  • Semen as Gift, Semen as Goods
  • Reproductive Workers and The Market in Altruism
  • Excess Scarcity and Desire among Drug-Using Sex Workers
  • Whores, Slaves and Stallions
  • Languages of Exlpoitation and Accommodation among Professional Boxers

Recent Product Reviews:

"The book is provocative, compelling and theoretically sophisticated, yet clear. It would be excellent for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses."
Margot Weiss, Duke University

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