Ebook: Bodily Interventions and Intimate Labour: Understanding Bioprecarity

Rapid recent developments in biotechnologies have produced both opportunities for and constraints on bodily interventions. This volume considers the interrelation between bodily interventions, intimate labour and bioprecarity, examining how different kinds of biotechnologized processes and regulations affect those who seek interventions and help. This includes kin-making with assisted reproductive technologies (ART) particularly among queer and trans people body modifications for those affected by female genital cutting (FGC), gender-affirming surgeries, medical humanitarian missions to poverty- and crisis-stricken countries, and the reappropriation of bodies that have been racialized through eugenicist practices. The authors argue that the vulnerabilities that these interventions create for those involved derive partly from the interventions themselves, but also from the ways in which legal, medical and other categorisations enable or disable access to different kinds of medical treatment. Bodily interventions and intimate labour links these concerns to other histories of bioprecarization, including, for example, help-seeking in the context of intimate partner violence, pursuing trans surgery and eugenicist treatments of indigenous people. In all these cases, certain social groups are marginalized based on how they are categorized in different kinds of discourses. Individuals are either denied or approved for treatment, made to perform particular identities to access this help, or have to travel abroad to receive treatment because of the category-dependent restrictions in their own country. With contributions from distinguished academics such as Petra Nordqvist and Ulrika Dahl, this volume appeals to readers in gender studies, sociology, cultural anthropology and social policy.