Chapter 5 - Life Industries

Summary

This chapter shows how the pervasive commodification of living tissue in biomedicine intensifies a neoliberal hegemony that encourages us to value all life in strictly economic metrics. Drawing on Hannah Landecker’s work on how cell cultures enabled the separation of living tissues from organisms, this chapter examines texts that narrate the experience of those whose bodies are targeted for extraction of vitality. Carola Dibbell’s The Only Ones and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves are both set in a future in which disenfranchised people have nothing beyond their biology to bring to market. Dibbell’s novel concerns clones and it deconstructs reactionary discourse that valorize the “natural,” showing how a fixed and unchanging notion of proper humanity reinscribes racialized divisions into valued and dispossessed classes of people. Dimaline’s novel literalizes the extraction of vitality in a grim future where the settler colonial state harvests bone marrow from indigenous peoples. Finally, Claire North’s 84K envisions a future UK in which all governance has been replaced by actuarial metrics, entirely displacing ethical and legal systems that adjudicate questions of justice with an accounting of financial gains and losses.