[P2P-F] biolabor, via orsan

Tue Jun 16 11:51:03 CEST 2015

*Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy
<http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/sow/38113-clinical-labor.html>*

*Catherine** Waldby & Melinda Cooper*

   "At last! A paradigm-shifting theorizing of biolabor—largely invisibled,
underpaid or donated work that produces invaluable human materials for
highly lucrative pharmaceutical and assisted reproductive technology
industries. Cooper and Waldby brilliantly analyze such labor as continuous
with low-waged distributed piece work characteristic of 21st century
post-Fordist bioeconomies, including venture labor (high risk/no pay).
These highly gendered and racialized divisions of labor are eerily
bioethics approved as they outsource risk to individual worker
'entrepreneurs' and put 'life itself' to work for biocapital.
Brava!!"—Adele E. Clarke, coeditor of *Biomedicalization: Technoscience,
Health, and Illness in the U.S.*

   Forms of embodied labor, such as surrogacy and participation in clinical
trials, are central to biomedical innovation, but they are rarely
considered as labor. Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby take on that
project, analyzing what they call clinical labor, and asking what such an
analysis might indicate about the organization of the bioeconomy and the
broader organization of labor and value today. At the same time, they
reflect on the challenges that clinical labor might pose to some of the
founding assumptions of classical, Marxist, and post-Fordist theories of
labor. Cooper and Waldby examine the rapidly expanding transnational labor
markets surrounding assisted reproduction and experimental drug trials. As
they discuss, the pharmaceutical industry demands ever greater numbers of
trial subjects to meet its innovation imperatives. The assisted
reproductive market grows as more and more households look to third-party
providers for fertility services and sectors of the biomedical industry
seek reproductive tissues rich in stem cells. Cooper and Waldby trace the
historical conditions, political economy, and contemporary trajectory of
clinical labor. Ultimately, they reveal clinical labor to be emblematic of
labor in twenty-first-century neoliberal economies.

Duke University Press

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