Abnormality as Accumulation Strategy: Orienting Embryos to Capital

Abstract

A long tradition of feminist and postcolonial scholarship has insisted on the centrality of social difference to regimes of capital accumulation. This article examines abnormality—one half of a binary categorization that evaluates bodies in relation to their success or failure in terms of health, productivity, and mental or physical capacity—as one such form of social difference. I examine the relationship between abnormality and capitalist value production from the vantage of the abnormal in vitro fertilization embryo. Although exceedingly difficult to commodify, abnormal embryos are multiply oriented to capital, caught up in circuits of value generation as living tools in the development of new (and promissory) biomedical knowledges, products, and profits. Abnormality, I argue, functions to smooth embryos’ entry into the tissue economy by severing their ties to full human life, potentiating new regimes of capital accumulation as it does so. Although emphatically different from the forms of dehumanization to which racialized, gendered, and colonial others are subject—not least because embryos are not full human life—abnormal embryos demonstrate, in very literal fashion, how the production of social difference operates to distribute life itself in ways that enable new accumulation strategies. This research is based on observations and interviews conducted at fertility clinics, scientific expos, embryo research labs, and reproductive medicine conferences in the United States between 2016 and 2018.