Commodifying bodies
By: edited by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Loic Wacquant.
Contributors: Scheper-Hughes, Nancy.; Wacquant, Loïc J. D.
Publisher: Sage Publications; SAGE Publications Ltd; Sage Publications Ltd
Published: 2002
Place of publication: London; Thousand Oaks, Calif
Language: eng
Number of pages: 199
Subjects: Bioethics.; Sale of organs, tissues, etc.; Biopolitics.
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.
Notes: Also available via the World Wide Web.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
"Published in association with theory, Culture & society,
"Originally published as Volume 7, Numbers 2-3 of Body & society 2001"--T.p. verso.