Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

From call centers, overseas domestic labor, and customer care to human organ selling, gestational surrogacy, and knowledge work, such as software programming, life itself is channeled across the globe from one population to another. In Life Support, Kalindi Vora demonstrates how biological bodies become a new kind of global biocapital.

Reviews

"Life Support is an ethnographic study of the biopolitics of vital energy from the perspective of Indian call centers and surrogacy hospitals. Kalindi Vora argues that affective and reproductive labors produce more than economic value by helping to form new life and socialities. This book enlivens feminist theories on the ethics of female empathy and exchange in the outsourcing of care."Aihwa Ong, coeditor of Asian Biotech and Worlding Cities

"The reader of this slim volume is likely to be astonished in that Voras book genuinely makes good on its title, delivering an original, dense, and entirely coherent theorization of biocapital."Antipode

"[A]n engaging read."CHOICE

"Voras analysis in terms of 'vital energy'is given particularly force because of her choice to set labor of a very literally embodied sortthe biological labor of pregnancy, 'commissioned'by intending parents from far away and compensated by a flat feealongside capital flows that are easier to mistake as simply financial and immaterial. Her comparison returns us sharply to the biological substance or embodied materiality of all labor."Somatosphere

"An engaging and provocative read that makes a significant contribution to current debates on globalization and labor."Pacific Affairs

Author Bio

Kalindi Vora is assistant professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego.