[csaa-forum] Change of venue GCS seminar tomorrow "Clinical Labour"

[Melissa Gregg]

PLEASE NOTE CHANGE OF VENUE
> 
> The next Department of Gender and Cultural Studies Seminar will be held Friday
> September 25 from 2pm-4pm in the Refectory, H113 in the Quadrangle Building.
> 
> See the map here:
> http://web.timetable.usyd.edu.au/venuebookings/venueDetails.jsp?venueFilter=re
> fec&venueNameSwitch=0&venueId=730&venueIdShort=730
> 
> 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.
>  
> 


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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