Commodifying Bodies

Nancy Scheper-Hughes ,

 
Tap to preview
Commodifying Bodies
Commodifying Bodies

About the eBook

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.

Show more

In The Press

About the Author

  • Publisher:
  • Published: ; Copyright:
  • ISBN:
  • Edition:
  • Title:
  • Series:
  • Author:
  • Imprint:
  • Language:
  • Number of Pages:  [disclaimer] Page count shown is an approximation provided by the publisher. The actual page count will vary based on various factors such your device's screen size and font-size.

Read online

You can read this ebook online in a web browser, without downloading anything or installing software.

Download file formats

This ebook is available in file types:

This ebook is available in:

After you've bought this ebook, you can choose to download either the PDF version or the ePub, or both.

DRM Free

The publisher has supplied this book in DRM Free form with digital watermarking.

Required software

You can read this eBook on any device that supports DRM-free EPUB or DRM-free PDF format.

Digital Rights Management (DRM)

The publisher has supplied this book in encrypted form, which means that you need to install free software in order to unlock and read it.

Required software

To read this ebook on a mobile device (phone or tablet) you'll need to install one of these free apps:

To download and read this eBook on a PC or Mac:

  • Adobe Digital Editions (This is a free app specially developed for eBooks. It's not the same as Adobe Reader, which you probably already have on your computer.)

Limits on printing and copying

The publisher has set limits on how much of this ebook you may print or copy. See details.

  • {{ format_drm_information.format_name }} unrestricted {{ format_drm_information.format_name }} {{format_drm_information.page_percent}}% pages every day{{format_drm_information.interval}} days {{ format_drm_information.format_name }} off
Read Aloud
  • {{ read_aloud_information.format_name }} on {{ read_aloud_information.format_name }} off
Subject categories
  •  > 
ISBNs