Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy. By Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. ix+279. $89.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

Abstract

Book Reviews My critiques point more to alternate analyses and theoretical preferences than to any shortcomings of this book, which has much to offer. Barnes had the fortitude to study a population that has been difficult to locate, let alone research extensively. She is skilled at asking questions that yield rich data, and her writing style is very accessible. Moreover, Barnes balances the right amount of empathy and analysis. I would highly recommend this book for those interested in examining connections between gender and medicine. Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bio- economy. By Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. ix1279. $89.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). Janet K. Shim University of California, San Francisco In scholarship on the contemporary role and practices of the biosciences in the production of knowledge, value, and life itself, Clinical Labor stands out as an important contribution that helps make sense of new incorporations of bodies, stratifications, and relations. Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby make a compelling case for defining clinical labor as the in vivo labor of production, metabolism, gestation, consumption, and oogenesis and sper- matogenesis that tissue donors in assisted reproduction and stem cell re- search, and human subjects in pharmaceutical trials, do. By naming this work as labor, the authors open up novel ways of historicizing that work and analyzing the markets, discourses (including bioethics), and relations that demand, supply, and structure such labor. After spending a chapter reviewing some of the major transformations in labor markets (e.g., the rise of labor outsourcing, service contracting, and human capital theory) that they argue deeply shape clinical labor, Cooper and Waldby first examine fertility outsourcing. They compare sperm and oocyte procurement as distinct forms of clinical labor that redistribute re- productive risks and capacities across geography, time, and class. Especially illuminating is their tracing of the various conditions that gave rise to the contractualization—and the specific terms of such contracts—of gamete out- sourcing in the United States. Expanding their analytic lens to transnational fertility chains, Cooper and Waldby argue for the concept of reproductive labor arbitrage, wherein cheaper sources of reproductive labor are bought in one place and then sold for higher prices elsewhere. Both the case of the European oocyte market and that of gestational surrogacy in India show the increasingly transactional nature of assisted reproduction. Despite anticommercial regulations in the European Union, the interpretive flexibility of “compensation” for the ex-