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Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby. Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014. 279 pp. $24.95 (978-0-8223-5622-6).
Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby's Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy offers a highly original, gendered analysis of expansive and emergent labor forms "hidden in plain sight" in the rapidly proliferating bioeconomy. Cooper and Waldby's feminist attention to the imbrication of labor, gendered personhood, and increasing commodification of bits of embodiment enables them to explore the current dance of bio-commodities in the volatile marketplace of health care. There, gender and class relations meet national regulatory and investment strategies. Just as Marx built his labor theory of value by universalizing the condition of the modal male factory worker, presumed to represent the current and near future of capital accumulation, Cooper and Waldby construct the near future of precarious, post-Fordist labor power by imagining how seemingly "immaterial" work, highly gendered and raced, is leading to innovations in outsourcing.
In an introductory chapter and throughout the book, they argue that emergent forms of flexible, part-time, low-waged precarious "clinical labor" is in large measure governed by a regime of bioethics. This masks the deeply regressive, exploitative individual "capitalization of the self" that sends tissue donors, surrogates, and clinical trial participants to "volunteer." It's a provocative, productive, unnerving claim on which...