Catherine Waldby,
"Citizenship, Labor, and the Biopolitics of the Bioeconomy:
Recruiting Female Tissue Donors for Stem-Cell Research"
(page 5 of 5)
I'm going to now just talk about the actual biology itself, and ways
in which biology has to be rethought to understand how we can think
about it as a kind of clinical reproductive labor. I'll first talk
about fertility outsourcing and the biology of assisted reproduction.
For the greater part of the 20th century, assisted reproduction
technologies and IVF have been devoted precisely to the mass
reproduction of animal life for industrial agriculture. That is where
IVF technologies emerged. They emerged from the management of large
industrial animal herds. IVF technology has also inherited concerns with
standardization, rationalization, and a kind of factory-production model
of scientific management. If we think about IVF as a process that
intervenes at different points in the trajectory of in vivo
reproduction, it breaks it down into its components, it scales some of
the components up, or scales them down, and it renders them ex vivo.
Therefore, instead of reproduction being something that takes place
inside the body through the self-regulating biology that goes to work to
make the baby, you actually identify the different points in the
reproductive process as if you're breaking it down into a production
line, if you like. You disaggregate insemination from conception. You
can disaggregate the egg from the body and with gestational surrogacy,
you can disaggregate the uterus from the actual contracting parent. So
we see this way in which the process of reproduction gets redistributed
in a much more, in a sense, industrial production line.
By doing this, it gets around certain kinds of clinical bottlenecks
in the process. So typically, people who go to have fertility
treatments have some kind of problem with one of these processes, and by
rendering it ex vivo, you can then address the particular problems.
There might be a problem with sperm, there might be a problem with eggs,
there might be a problem with gestation itself, and if you can just
isolate and externalize these different aspects, then you can get around
the bottleneck and you can get your baby in the end. Well, you may
not, of course—the success rates are not that high. It is a kind of
industrialization of the process of reproduction, and it is precisely
this industrialization which lends it to the new kinds of spatial
ordering, so you can use Indian populations, you can use East European
populations as reproductive sites, precisely because of this
disaggregation.
It seems to me that it is very, very similar to the off-shoring and
subcontracting and manufacture which happened in the 1990s, where in
response to the falling rates of profit for industrial manufacture in
the United States and Western Europe, that manufacturing goes off
shore. It goes to southern China, in particular. But of course, the
head office stays in Europe or the United States and you subcontract your
production out to this other site. This is really effectively what is
happening with this off-shoring and fertility outsourcing. You identify
low-cost populations, if you can facilitate different stages of your
reproductive process, more cheaply than you could if you were to stay in
the relative wealth of the global North.
The process is nevertheless different from the stem cell process
because it's concerned with preserving the developmental pathways that
will eventually produce a child, even if these pathways have to travel
through several different bodies. You keep the pathways more or less the
same, you just divert them outside the body, and eventually you will
send them back. Stem cell research is quite different from this, because
it is precisely concerned with disrupting the teleology of the
production of an organism, a child. It's precisely about experimenting
with cellular potential and diverting cellular potential in all kinds of
novel ways that have nothing to do with the reproduction of an organism.
You define the potential of the cell in a radically-different way from
how it's defined in reproductive medicine.
So in the case of embryonic stem cells, the pluripotency of the
embryo is diverted away from the production of the blastocyst and
eventually, the fetus, and towards the production of a cell line. The
cell line immortalizes the tissue and facilitates the self-perpetuating
potential in vitro. They are called immortalized cell lines because
theoretically, the cell line will live indefinitely and just reproduce
the same kind of tissues over and over and over again in the laboratory.
Theoretically then, the embryonic stem cell line can produce any of the
specialized, fully-differentiated cells that constitute a developing
organism, while continuing to divide and produce more of themselves in
an uncommitted ex-organism state.
This is a technology concerned with the potential of the cell. It's
concerned with the future possibilities of differentiation that are
always surplus to the finite possibilities of differentiation within the
organism itself. If our bodies start to proliferate cells in an
immortalized fashion, we call it cancer, and of course, it's an
extremely serious clinical condition. But precisely the same kind of
open-ended proliferation, in vitro, is an extremely bio-valuable
capacity and it is highly sought-after. The biology of the cell is
being reorganized around the promissory value form, which animates the
stock market-driven, post-Fordist mode of accumulation—or at least it
did until about a year ago.
So we have been very much acculturated to an economy which works on
the promise of value, which is what stock market value is. It is always
about value that takes place in the future. Suddenly, though, with the
global financial crisis, the future seems to have stopped and it is
intriguing to think about how the promissory value of biomedicine might
relate to this failure of promissory value in the broader economy.
I will just make a couple of concluding comments. As I said, a key
feature of life sciences research and bioeconomic development since the
1970s is about the recalibration of reproductive processes of
biology, and more and more of these processes have been turned into a
new material base for production. The whole regenerative medicine
paradigm is precisely about securing the reproductive process of biology
and transforming it into a new material base for the production of
clinically-useful material. I think it would be fair to say that if we
combine that development with the development I was talking about
before—the ways in which the reproductive sphere of Fordism has been put on
the market—reproduction in general has been put to work, so the whole
reproduction is now involved in a kind of labor.
Both the domestic life of the Fordist economy and the biological
reproduction of the body have been put on the post-Fordist labor market,
if you like, and really, what we are trying to do in the book is to
think about the implications of that development for women and for the
populations in developing and transitional economies who are most caught
up in the process.
Podcast
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Catherine Waldby - Podcast Description
Catherine Waldby is a Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology and Social
Policy at The University of Sydney, Australia. In this lecture, delivered on November 6, 2009 at Barnard College, Professor Waldby
explores the emerging tensions between women's voluntary (public good) donation
of reproductive tissues for stem cell research and the increasing resort to transactional
forms of tissue procurement, for example egg sharing and egg vending. She locates this
tension in both a feminist biopolitical analysis and in the broader dynamics of the global
bioeconomy.
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