Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor PDF
Preview Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor
Life Support Vora.indd 1 16/01/2015 11:38:24 AM Difference Incorporated Roderick A. Ferguson and Grace Kyungwon Hong Series Editors Vora.indd 2 16/01/2015 11:38:24 AM Life Support Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor Kalindi Vora Difference Incorporated University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London Vora.indd 3 16/01/2015 11:38:24 AM Portions of chapter 1 appeared in “Limits of Labor: Accounting for Affect and the Biological in Transnational Surrogacy and Service Work,” South Atlantic Quarterly 111, no. 4 (2012): 681– 700. Portions of chapter 2 appeared in “The Commodification of Affect in Indian Call Centers,” in Intimate Labors: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Care, Sex, and Domestic Work, edited by E. Boris and R. Parreñas, 3– 48 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010). Copyright 2015 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vora, Kalindi. Life support : biocapital and the new history of outsourced labor / Kalindi Vora. (Difference incorporated) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8166-9394-8 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8166-9396-2 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Biotechnology industries—India. 2. High technology industries—India. 3. Contracting out—India. 4. Labor policy—India. I. Title. HD9999.B443I58 2015 331.5´420954—dc23 2014019930 Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer. 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Vora.indd 4 16/01/2015 11:38:24 AM In memory of Nisheeth J itendra V ora Vora.indd 5 16/01/2015 11:38:24 AM This page intentionally left blank Contents Introduction. Life Support: India’s Production of Vital Energy 1 1 Limits of Labor: Affect and the Biological in Transnational Surrogacy and Service Work 25 2 Call Center Agents: Commodified Affect and the Biocapital of Care 43 3 Information Technology Professionals: Innovation and Uncertain Futures 67 4 Transnational Gestational Surrogacy: Expectation and Exchange 103 Epilogue: Imperial Pasts and Mortgaged Futures 141 Acknowledgments 149 Notes 153 Index 175 Vora.indd 7 16/01/2015 11:38:24 AM This page intentionally left blank Introduction Life Support India’s Production of Vital Energy In October 2002, an article was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on the phenomenon of impoverished people in India selling kidneys for transplant.1 The JAMA publication was one of the first in mainstream medicine to recognize the existence of the international trade in human organs. In the years since, critical public discourse about the organ trade has primarily focused on ethics, values, and human rights as they allow for and can potentially limit the exploitation that occurs through the market in human organs.2 However, the advent of the procurement and circu- lation of human organs as a market also reflects a logic and geopolitics that emerged together with outsourcing practices characterizing the global econ- omy in the 1990s. This logic and geography have enacted and continue to pro- duce new forms of the global distribution of labor, first as outsourcing emerged from colonial geopolitics and later as what anthropologists of the biotechnol- ogy economy are calling biocapital. The creation of value through the growing realm of feminized work sourced from India, which for the purposes of this study includes domestic work, cus- tomer care, the production of biological commodities and services like human organs and gestation, and “noninnovative” knowledge work, occurs through the investment of human energy in other bodies— both individual and social bodies— as well as through the sociocultural valorization of those bodies and communities. This form of life support is transmitted across boundaries of cul- tural and social difference, across gendered divides within the same household 1 Vora.indd 1 16/01/2015 11:38:24 AM
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