June 16 – Life Support: Race, Technology and the Gendered Biocapital of Outsourced Labor

Kalindi Vora (University of California, San Diego)

This talk thinks through how biological bodies have become a new kind of global biocapital, extending historical legacies of colonial labor practices. It examines how forms of technologized labor serve to support life in the United States at the expense of the lives of people in India. Focusing on several case studies of outsourced work, it exposes the ways in which seemingly inalienable aspects of human life such as care, love, and trust—as well as biological bodies and organs—are not only commodi able entities but also components essential to contemporary capitalism. It asks, How do forms of transnational gendered reproductive labors of care, nurture, and even biological reproductivity (such as in transnational surrogacy and reproductive services) provide an opportunity to look at historical legacies of gender and labor that have been theorized through the lens of US Ethnic Studies, while calling for a new and relational understanding of the political potential in how subjects disrupt their geographies and the roles assigned to them through their labor?

Kalindi Vora is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and a liate faculty of the Science Studies and Critical Gender Studies Programs at UC San Diego.