Increasingly the body is a possession that does not belong to us. It is boughtand sold bartered and stolen marketed wholesale or in parts. The professions espec... » 

Increasingly the body is a possession that does not belong to us. It is boughtand sold bartered and stolen marketed wholesale or in parts. The professions especially reproductive medicine transplant surgery and bioethics but alsojournalism and other cultural specialists have been pliant partners in thisaccelerating commodification of live and dead human organisms. Under the guiseof healing or research they have contributed to a new ethic of parts forwhich the divisible body is severed from the self torn from the social fabricand thrust into commercial transactions as organs secretions reproductivecapacities and tissues responding to the dictates of an incipiently globalmarketplace.Breaking with established approaches which prioritize the body as text thechapters in this book examine not only images of the bodyturnedmerchandisebut actually existing organisms considered at once as material entities semimagical tokens symbolic vectors and founts of lived experience. The topicscovered range from the cultural disposal and media treatment of corpses thebiopolitics of cells sperm banks and eugenics to the internationaltrafficking of kidneys the development of transplant tourism to the idiomsof corporeal exploitation among prizefighters as a limiting case of fleshlycommodity.This insightful and arresting volume combines perspectives from anthropologylaw medicine and sociology to offer compelling analyses of the concrete waysin which the body is made into a commodity and how its marketization in turnremakes social relations and cultural meanings. «