Synopses & Reviews
Review
"At last! A paradigm-shifting theorizing of 'biolabor'—largely invisible, underpaid, or donated work that produces invaluable human materials for highly lucrative pharmaceutical and assisted reproductive technology industries. Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby brilliantly analyze such labor as continuous with low-waged distributed piecework characteristic of twenty-first-century post-Fordist bioeconomies, including venture labor (high risk/no pay). These highly gendered and racialized divisions of labor are eerily bioethics-approved as they outsource risk to individual worker 'entrepreneurs' and put 'life itself' to work for biocapital. Brava!"
Review
“In the literature on contributors to medical knowledge, attention is most often focused on basic and applied researchers, funders, and regulators. In Clinical Labor, Cooper and Waldby focus on an essential, overlooked, and perhaps exploited population, that of research subjects. The authors are at their strongest in applying a Marxist theoretical perspective to class in medical research and the need to conceptualize participation in clinical trials as labor. . . . Recommended. Graduate students, researchers/faculty, and professionals/practitioners.”
Review
"Poised to be not only a classic analysis of the bioeconomy, but the strongest exemplar of a style of analysis of which we urgently need more."
Review
"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.... Clinical Labor provides a forceful instance of Marxist–feminist theory, focusing on the next stage of capital accumulation, worker consciousness, and potential opposition."
Review
"In scholarship on the contemporary role and practices of the biosciences in the production of knowledge, value, and life itself,Clinical Labor stands out as an important contribution that helps make sense of new incorporations of bodies, stratifications, and relation.... Clinical Labor is sweeping and comprehensive, fluidly showing how legal concepts and economic practices interweave with biomedical production and bioethics."
Synopsis
Forms of embodied labor, such as surrogacy and participation in clinical trials, are central to biomedical innovation, but they are rarely considered as labor. The authors take on that project, analyzing what they call clinical labor and asking what such an analysis might indicate about the organization of the bio-economy and the broader organization of labor and value today.
About the Author
Melinda Cooper is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.
Catherine Waldby is a Professorial Future Fellow in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney. She is coauthor, with Herbert Gottweis and Brian Salter, of The Global Politics of Human Embryonic Stem Cell Science: Regenerative Medicine in Transition and, with Robert Mitchell, of Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism, which is also published by Duke University Press.