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Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don't know her name? Although she has claim, she is not claimed.
-Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
We stumble upon her in exorbitant circumstances that yield no picture of the everyday life, no paths to her thoughts, no glimpse of the vulnerability of her face or of what looking at such a face may demand. We only knew what can be extrapolated from an analysis of the ledger or borrowed from the world of her captors and masters and applied to her.
-Saidiya Hartman, "Venus in Two Acts" (2008)
The publication of Rebecca Skloot's creative nonfiction title,1 The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010), unleashed a flurry of public responses that consequently inspired a renewed critical discourse on biopolitics and its implications for racialized, gendered, and queer bodies.2 In Skloot's version of this narrative, Henrietta Lacks, a working-class African American woman, achieves a warped immortality when the cancer cells extracted from her cervix "reproduced boisterously" (Margonelli BR20) outside her body. Intrigued by the capacity of her cancer cells to reproduce on their own, doctors at Johns Hopkins University, unbeknownst to Lacks or her family, not only distributed these cell cultures among themselves for medical research but also traded them transnationally for immense profits. As a result, these cells, which came to be immortalized as HeLa cells, proved profitable to the medical industrial complex long after Henrietta Lacks's cancer-ridden body, burned black by radiation treatments, was quietly lowered into her unmarked grave in 1951.
Although the HeLa cells have been a subject of academic articles for quite some time,3 Immortal Life has the remarkable distinction of making accessible to the general public what were once arcane bioethical debates regarding the relationships between public science, patient autonomy, and the politics of race, class, and gender. The public imagination has been captured in part by the story of how the HeLa cells have attained a life of their own, becoming ubiquitous by having quite possibly inhabited countless bodies. This ubiquity has wrought "a revolution in cell...