Commodifying Bodies (Theory, Culture and Society, 481) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0761940332 ISBN 13: 9780761940333

Verlag: Sage Publications UK, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nancy Scheper-Hughes is Professor of Anthropology, University of California at Berkeley where she also directs the doctoral program in critical studies of medicine, science and the body. She is the Director of "Organs Watch", a medical human rights research and documentation project housed at UC Berkeley.

Loic Wacquant is Researcher at the Centre de sociologie européene du collège de France and a Professor of Sociology and Research Fellow at the Earl Warren Legal Institute, University of California at Berkeley.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Sage Publications UK
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0761940332
• ISBN 13: 9780761940333
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Herausgeber: Scheper-Hughes Nancy, Wacquant Loic
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland