From 'the pill' in Puerto Rico to Tuskegee, brown bodies are a dispensable site of experimentation, harkening back to capital C-colonial times. Back then, colonized spaces were literally seen as laboratories where the colonized became convenient subjects for frontier science. Borders were haphazardly drawn as white men robbed sovereign people of their bodily integrities in the name of knowledge production and 'innovation'. There is a whiteness inherent to transnational 'drug trials', one that becomes blindingly apparent when placed against a history of imperialism and racist knowledge production.
In "When Experiments Travel", Petryna documents multiple manifestation and mechanics of the violence that arises when corporations treat the world as their laboratories. The resulting biopolitical negotiation that subjected individuals partake in is something she calls biological citizenship, "a massive demand for, but selective access to a form of social welfare based on scientific and legal criteria that acknowledge injury and compensate for it." (28) Individuals have to constantly bargain with immense power structures in order to navigate a biomedicalized world and gain access to life-saving medication, sometimes at the cost of their bodily integrity.
While reading all this, I was also thinking about other instances of transnational ethics. Something which came up recently were transnational surrogacies that I read about in another class. Brown women's bodies were being treated as these laboratories for new capitalist frontiers. In class, we read about white gay men in Israel that were paying upwards of a hundred thousand dollars to corporations that harvest eggs from poor white women (hundreds of dollars compensated) in the Global South (Eastern Europe, South Africa), implanting them into surrogates in India + Nepal (a few thousand dollars, maybe). Monetary compensation is emphasized as dollars are equated to the amount of labor and ethics violated. Most jarring was the extent to which ""queer"" (quote emphasized for contestation of identity vs. structure) white subjects channel technology in order to ascend to full heteropatriarchial capitalist subjectivity, here being the achievement of a white nuclear family.
In "When Experiments Travel", Petryna documents multiple manifestation and mechanics of the violence that arises when corporations treat the world as their laboratories. The resulting biopolitical negotiation that subjected individuals partake in is something she calls biological citizenship, "a massive demand for, but selective access to a form of social welfare based on scientific and legal criteria that acknowledge injury and compensate for it." (28) Individuals have to constantly bargain with immense power structures in order to navigate a biomedicalized world and gain access to life-saving medication, sometimes at the cost of their bodily integrity.
While reading all this, I was also thinking about other instances of transnational ethics. Something which came up recently were transnational surrogacies that I read about in another class. Brown women's bodies were being treated as these laboratories for new capitalist frontiers. In class, we read about white gay men in Israel that were paying upwards of a hundred thousand dollars to corporations that harvest eggs from poor white women (hundreds of dollars compensated) in the Global South (Eastern Europe, South Africa), implanting them into surrogates in India + Nepal (a few thousand dollars, maybe). Monetary compensation is emphasized as dollars are equated to the amount of labor and ethics violated. Most jarring was the extent to which ""queer"" (quote emphasized for contestation of identity vs. structure) white subjects channel technology in order to ascend to full heteropatriarchial capitalist subjectivity, here being the achievement of a white nuclear family.
This reminds me of the potentially fictional phenomenon of German women traveling to Kashmir to get Aryan sperm. It’s ‘exposed’ in this shady documentary called “Achtung Baby” that’s nowhere to be found for streaming or purchase, and has only this clip left for viewing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC8CXRDpSsk
ReplyDeleteThere are conspiracy theories circulating on the internet that the government is behind the documentary/clip to promote their aryan tourism campaign. I don’t know about that but it is true that the government has actively tried to market the village of Batalik as “the last pure specimens of the Aryan race,” in part to mitigate the associations of the region with violence (it is the most militarized zone in the world…). The Aryan race theory is a racial ideology that was manufactured and propagated by the West, but militant groups now rely on this discourse of Aryan and Hindu indigeneity to validate their hold on India’s disputed territory.
After our conversations the last two weeks I’ve been trying to think about how genetic ancestry testing might play out in India where the aryan race theory and claims of dravidian lineage play a huge role in politics, especially in South India and Sri Lanka. From what I understand these racial claims would be hard to support using 23 and me style testing, but because India (unlike the United States) has an extensively documented history, with a lot of Hindutva pride stemming from texts from antiquity, extensively pieced together legends and racial origin stories kind of fulfill the role of genetic ancestry testing. Like in the US, these racial claims are always in context of degrees of ’purity.' Also, the rigidification of racial/religious identities only really happened because of colonialism, and now India is desperately trying to Westernize and functions kind of as the US's Israel in south asia.