[csaa-forum] GCS seminar this Friday "Clinical Labour"

Tue Sep 22 07:54:12 CST 2009

The next Department of Gender and Cultural Studies Seminar will be held this
Friday September 25 from 2pm-4pm. All Welcome.

Theme: Clinical Labour  Gendered Transformations of Biomedical Research

Speakers: Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby (USyd)

Chair: Kane Race

The rapidly expanding field of life sciences research is increasingly
dominated by global commercial interests. The OECD has identified life
sciences research as the next wave of innovation driving large sectors of
the global knowledge economy (OECD 2006). However, if a viable medical
bioeconomy is to be built, medical researchers require proprietary control
of high volumes of human tissue, and access to a growing number of research
subjects to test new drugs and treatments. Since the late 1990s the leading
bioeconomies  the USA, Britain, parts of Scandinavia, and increasingly
nations in South and East Asia  India, China, Taiwan, South Korea,
Singapore  have seen a rapid expansion in demand for both reproductive and
research embryos and oöcytes, cord blood for stem cell research, and blood
donation for large scale DNA databases, including national biobanks.

While Œdonors¹ subjects are essential productive agents in this burgeoning
bioeconomic activity, their contribution is nevertheless understood in
property law, bioethics,and government regulation as part of a national gift
economy, a form of voluntarism and a function of participatory citizenship.
This framework persists, despite widespread recognition of the essentially
commercial nature of much biomedical research and the increasingly
transactional nature of tissue Œdonation.¹ In this paper, we propose the
concept of Œclinical labour¹ as an alternative way of theorizing the
contemporary economies of tissue exchange and their contractual forms.

We will focus on the development of global markets for both reproductive and
research oöcytes, in which generally poor oöcytes vendors sell their tissues
to brokers and IVF clinics. While the USA has a high cost oöcyte market,
where college educated women can sell oöcytes for considerable sums
(although at some risk), reproductive brokerage companies increasingly
recruit from less expensive vendors, an exemplary case of global labor
arbitrage (crossing borders to recruit lower wage workers). Brokerage
companies effectively mediate between wealthy and poor populations that
share a racial phenotype and often a national border  notably
Eastern/Western Europe and South Korea/Japan.

In our attempt to theorize these economies, we revisit and problematize the
materialist feminist tradition of thinking around Œreproductive labour¹,
political economies of Œsexual labour¹ (Kempadoo; Truong; Bernstein) and
more recent theories of post-fordist labour. We contend that contemporary
economies of feminized, clinical labour problematize the very meaning of
Œreproduction¹ assumed by the materialist tradition. We also argue that a
major difference between Fordist uncompensated reproductive labour and the
contemporary relations of reproduction is a denationalisation of the
reproductive sphere and its exposure to global precarious labour markets.
Modes of tissue exchange that were once regulated within an economy of the
gift are now increasingly subject to more or less immediate forms of
commodification and informal labour relations, while the national
citizenship model of blood and tissue donation is undercut by emerging
transnational circuits of tissue exchange. These circuits are often closely
aligned with the geographies of labour migration that characterize more
familiar forms of informal service labour such as prostitution, cleaning and
childcare. We analyse oöcyte vending as precarious female labor in the lower
echelons of the global bioeconomy, and compare it to other forms of
racialized female labor, particularly sex work.

About the speakers:

Melinda Cooper is lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy
at the University of Sydney. She is author of Life as Surplus: Biotechnology
and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (2008). She is currently working on a
book manuscript, co-authored with Catherine Waldby, called Clinical Labour 
Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy.¹

Associate Professor Catherine Waldby is International Research Fellow in the
Department of Sociology and Social Policy, Sydney University. She researches
and publishes in social studies of biomedicine and the life sciences. Her
books include AIDS and the Body Politic: Biomedicine and Sexual Difference
(1996 Routledge), The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman
Medicine (2000 Routledge),Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs and Cell Lines in
Late Capitalism (with Robert Mitchell, Duke University Press 2006) and The
Global Politics of Human Embryonic Stem Cell Science: Regenerative Medicine
in Transition, (with Herbert Gottweis and Brian Salter, Palgrave 2009). She
has received national and international research grants for her work on
embryonic stem cells, blood donation and biobanking.

Location:
All seminars are held in the New Law School Annexe, Seminar Room 442, on
Eastern Avenue. 
This is the triangular glass building half way along on your right if
entering campus from City Road Main Gate.
See the map here: http://www.law.usyd.edu.au/about/campus.shtml
<http://www.law.usyd.edu.au/about/campus.shtml>

Dr. Melissa Gregg
Lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies
Main Quadrangle Building A14
University of Sydney NSW 2006

p 02 9351 3657 | m 0408 599 359 | e mel.gregg at usyd.edu.au

http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/gcs/staff/profiles/mgregg.shtml

Enrol in our NEW Master of Cultural Studies:
http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/gcs/postgrad/coursework.shtml

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