Abnormality as Accumulation Strategy: Orienting Embryos to Capital

Abstract

A long tradition of feminist and postcolonial scholarship has insisted on the centrality of social difference to regimes of capital accumulation. This article examines abnormality—one half of a binary categorization that evaluates bodies in relation to their success or failure in terms of health, productivity, and mental or physical capacity—as one such form of social difference. I examine the relationship between abnormality and capitalist value production from the vantage of the abnormal in vitro fertilization embryo. Although exceedingly difficult to commodify, abnormal embryos are multiply oriented to capital, caught up in circuits of value generation as living tools in the development of new (and promissory) biomedical knowledges, products, and profits. Abnormality, I argue, functions to smooth embryos’ entry into the tissue economy by severing their ties to full human life, potentiating new regimes of capital accumulation as it does so. Although emphatically different from the forms of dehumanization to which racialized, gendered, and colonial others are subject—not least because embryos are not full human life—abnormal embryos demonstrate, in very literal fashion, how the production of social difference operates to distribute life itself in ways that enable new accumulation strategies. This research is based on observations and interviews conducted at fertility clinics, scientific expos, embryo research labs, and reproductive medicine conferences in the United States between 2016 and 2018.

女权主义和后殖民主义学说有个很长的传统，坚持认为资本积累体系的核心是社会差异。本文认为，异形（在健康、生育、脑力或体力方面，评价人体成功和失败的两类标准中的一类）是社会差异的一种形式。本文研究了异形与体外受精胚胎异常所具有的优势价值的相互关系。尽管异形胚胎很难进行商品化，但是由于卷入了创造价值的循环过程中，异形胚胎被迫成为开发新的（和期盼中的）生物医学知识、产品和利润的工具，因此异形胚胎在很大程度上具有资本的性质。本文认为，通过切断与人类生命的联系，异形可以舒缓胚胎进入组织经济的过程，强化新的资本积累体系。因为胚胎不具备全部人类生命，异形胚胎与去人性化（种族化、性别化、殖民性等）也有所不同。异形胚胎展示了社会差异如何为了建立新的积累策略而去分配人类生命。该研究基于2016至2018年对美国生育诊所、科技会展、胚胎研究实验室、生殖医学会议的观察和采访而完成。

Una larga tradición académica feminista y poscolonial ha insistido en la centralidad de la diferencia social en los regímenes de acumulación de capital. Este artículo examina la anormalidad—la mitad de una categorización binaria que evalúa los cuerpos en relación con su éxito o fracaso en términos de salud, productividad y capacidad mental o física—como una de las formas de diferencia social. Examino la relación entre anormalidad y la producción capitalista de valor desde el punto de observación de lo anormal en la fertilización del embrión in vitro. Aunque son excesivamente difíciles de comodificar, los embriones anormales están plenamente orientados hacia el capital, atrapados en circuitos de generación de valor como herramientas vivas en el desarrollo de nuevos (y promisorios) conocimientos biomédicos, productos y ganancias. La anormalidad, sostengo yo, funciona para suavizar la entrada de los embriones en la economía de los tejidos, al cortar sus lazos con la vida humana plena, dándole potencia al hacer eso a nuevos regímenes de acumulación de capital. Aunque enfáticamente diferente de las formas de deshumanización a las que son sometidos los racializados, discriminados por género, colonizados—no menos porque los embriones no sean vida humana plena—los embriones anormales demuestran, de una manera muy literal, cómo opera la producción de diferencia social para distribuir la vida misma en modos que habilitan nuevas estrategias de acumulación. Esta investigación está basada en observaciones y entrevistas llevadas a cabo en clínicas de fertilidad, expos científicos, laboratorios de investigación sobre embriones y conferencias de medicina reproductiva en los Estados Unidos entre 2016 y 2018.

Key Words:

• abnormality
• biovalue
• capitalism
• social difference
• tissue economy

关键词:

• 异形
• 生物价值
• 资本主义
• 社会差异
• 组织经济

Palabras clave:

• anormalidad
• biovalor
• capitalismo
• diferencia social
• economía de tejidos

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Rosemary Collard, Gerry Pratt, and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

1 Roe v. Wade is the U.S Supreme Court decision that protects a pregnant person’s right to abortion.

2 A study presented at the ASRM in 2017 found an increase in the PGT-M caseload of 30 percent between 2014 and 2016.

3 Waldby and Cooper (2008, 2010) suggested “regenerative labor” as a more precise designation than “reproductive labor” for the form of productivity at stake in regenerative medicine, which is not concerned with the reproduction of a child but with the indefinite potential of disaggregated embryonic cells. Stem cell research, they suggested, calls forth difference capacities from the body, renegotiating the very conception of what the body is capable of doing.

Additional information

Funding

Thanks to the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship for funding this project.

Notes on contributors

Juliane Collard

JULIANE COLLARD is a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests lie at the intersection of the social and the biological, production and reproduction, and science and capitalism.