Vol. 10 No. 10 (October 2000) pp. 547-550.
BODY/POLITICS: STUDIES IN REPRODUCTION, PRODUCTION, AND (RE)CONSTRUCTION by Thomas C. Shevory. Westport, CT.: Praeger Publishers, 2000. 249 pp. Cloth $59.95. ISBN: 0-275-96740-9.
Reviewed by Julia Riches, Department of Government, Georgetown University.
In BODY/POLITICS political scientist Thomas Shevory provides a progressive analysis of the emancipatory and repressive possibilities of the rapid developments within technologies that govern and alter the body. The main thrust of the book is that advances in biotechnology are destabilizing traditional liberal boundaries. They also present opportunities both for increased commodification and market alienation of the body (previously a largely private arena), and for subversion and reinvention, spaces in which progressive politics might flourish. The ways in which we conceptualize our bodies, our relationship to our bodies and the meaning(s) of our bodies, Shevory argues, are challenged and potentially expanded by these technologies, even as the liberal ideological commitment to private property sees such technologies as opportunities for greater capital accumulation. Thus, Shevory, through a Marxian lens darkly, proposes that, "Technological manipulations of and commodifications of the body should thus be studied as historical transformations of capitalism" (p. 3), with all that that implies.
In a prefatory chapter, Shevory identifies two dominant and opposing stances towards technology, labeling them technoprogressivism and technophobia. Technoprogressives, as the name implies, embrace the informational and biotechnological revolutions that have transformed contemporary living. Technophobes, from Luddites to Jacques Ellul to biocentric Earth Firsters bewail such revolutions as portents of doom for man (and it always seems to be "man"), "society" and "nature" alike. Shevory does a convincing job of arguing that one of the central schisms in the modern Republican Party reflects this split. It appears as a division among a "cyber right," exemplified by Newt Gingrich's affection for Alvin Toffler, the sections of the party alive to the interests of global capital, and a patriot right whose dominant themes of nationalistic protectionism have driven some, such as Pat Buchanan from the party altogether. At base, Shevory argues, these are arguments over boundaries -- national boundaries, familial boundaries, individual boundaries. For the patriot right, traditional categories of "race, nation and patriarchal authority" (p. 210) are threatened by body technologies such as plastic surgery, which can obscure "true" genetic heritage, by transnational institutions and immigration, and by assisted reproductive technologies that diversify familial constellations and drastically undermine traditional conceptions (literally and metaphorically) of sex, parenthood and family.
Shevory rejects the simplistic embrace or rejection of technological transformations. Building on Marxian critical theory and postmodern feminist analyses, he articulates an alternative, more
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nuanced assessment of technological change that explores both the potentialities and pitfalls presented by new technologies. Borrowing heavily from Foucault, he identifies a postmodern dialectic in which "technological change will be creatively destructive, opening new avenues for equality, diversity, self-expression, resistance to hierarchy and control, while also offering new means for domination, exploitation, oppression and dehumanization" (p. 3). He thus places himself in a critical space also occupied by Herbert Marcuse and feminist critical theorists such as Donna Haraway
The book is organized as a series of case studies. Central to each thematic chapter are the legal cases through which the power relations inherent in technological and capital transformation have been manifested and negotiated. The chapters cover surrogacy, assisted reproductive technologies, biotechnology and property relations, and the beauty industry, particularly the practice of plastic surgery. In each of these, the public marketplace has made inroads into the body and into spheres traditionally thought of as private. Each technology contains both oppressive and liberatory potential. Each is contingent and in play.
Surrogacy and other, more explicitly technological, assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) pose interesting challenges to traditional liberal notions of the family. First, the multiplicity of potential claims to parenthood undermines the primacy of both the genetic and affective ties that have described and defined the notion of family. Many individuals may contribute to the creation of one child, many family structures - including non-heterosexual - are possible, and cloning hovers on the horizon. Second, these new models of reproduction have also explicitly commodified the reproductive body. Surrogacy and ARTs do not come cheap, and Shevory drastically underestimates the cost of one cycle of in vitro fertilization (IVF) when he quotes a $5,000 price tag. In these days in which intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) is an integral component of IVF, the cost is three to four times that.
New models of reproduction throw the meaning of the fetus and the meaning of women's reproductive labor and rights into relief. Lower courts, the media and the public psyche have been marked by controversies such as Baby M and cases involving the disposition of unimplanted embryos. How do we define a 'mother' in the face of conflicting claims? Also, how is the claim to reproductive freedom affected when the embryo is outside the woman's body?
As Shevory notes, "Location has become a crucial variable for determining how and whether a woman's prerogatives in relation to the fetus can be invoked"(p. 94). In cases such as A. Z. v. B. Z. (2000) and DAVIS v DAVIS (1992), courts have upheld the right not to procreate, thereby nullifying the presumably equally compelling right TO procreate. Someone has to win a zero sum game. Do such determinations depend on whether we negotiate the fate of frozen concepti as a matter property or custody? When Shevory writes that "bioethicists and newspaper reporters say.that 'society' or 'law' is not equipped to deal with advancing technologies," his rather dismissive tone belies the fact that the basic point is accurate: courts are struggling to retrofit existing law to apply to novel situations, and this very process is what brings the problematic nature of the 'body' politic so starkly into the light. Law's failure reveals interpretive and political opportunities.
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The nexus between property, biotechnological innovation and the body is perhaps most starkly exemplified in cases such as MOORE v REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA (1990), in which a California court denied any claim of a share of profits to a man whose spleen had provided the material for a major medical and pharmaceutical breakthrough. As Shevory notes, the case throws us "back to the basic Lockean conundrum: Who participates in the ordinal distribution of entitlements? And who sets the ground rules?" (p. 162). Under MOORE, people do not have a property right in their bodies, yet the self and bodies are becoming increasingly detachable, increasingly alienable, and increasingly fungible. This destabilization of the notion of self presents real political challenges; for example, in Shevory's words, "The concept of 'right' seems incoherent in a culture subversive of the underlying notion of a 'rights holder' or self" (p. 166)
Obscured identity forms part of Shevory's discussion of "(Re)constructions of appearance." He complains of a dearth of incisive critical work on the cultural politics of physical beauty (pace Bordo, Wolf and Chernin), and this chapter points out several points of departure for more extensive research and critique and would be a good starting point for someone unfamiliar with the field. From the more theoretical concerns of the obfuscation of real and apparent that plastic surgery presents, to the dialectic of the social saturation of beauty norms, subversive resistances against such norms and the co-opting of these transgressive looks into the beauty marketplace, this chapter is both cohesive yet frustratingly fragmented, the latter partly as a constraint of space.
There is another thematic chapter, on the takings clause and the environment. Although this chapter fits into Shevory's larger critique of the commodification, alteration and continued politicization of spaces considered private through the opportunities (financial and otherwise) presented by biotech innovations, it is the book's weakest link. Though the contrast between "wise use" politics and patenting of gene lines underscores the dephysicalization of property, the discussion of the Sagebrush Rebellion fits ill with the more neatly comparable discussions situated in the human body.
In many ways, the personal is increasingly alienable. The personal is still, however, highly political, and perhaps this could be the crudest and pithiest distillation of the book. Shevory takes a "critical legal" stance asserting it to be the only approach sensitive to the multiplicities of the law. He dismisses other "liberal" approaches tout court and in doing so, I think, gives rather short shrift to Law and Society work in particular. At times he cites woefully out-of-date sources, and makes odd, interpretive mistakes such as when he claims that Judith Jarvis Thomson's classic violinist example does not implicate bodily integrity (p. 93). Occasionally Shevory slips into annoying language as, for example, when he talks about "acts of creative destruction" (e.g. p. 38), but on the whole, this is an engrossing and thoughtful analysis of a fascinating area which really does present fantastic and fantastical challenges to existing ideological, legal, and political structures. The body technologies he describes are contextual, dialectical and ambivalent. Though he does not necessarily break any new ground with this book, it is an interesting read that will be of particular use and interest to cultural studies readers who could benefit, I think,
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from the overtly political analysis and legal focus it provides.
CASE REFERENCES:
A.Z. v B. Z., 431 Mass. 150, 525 N.E.2d 1051 (2000).
DAVIS v. DAVIS, 842 S.W. 2d 588 (1992).
MOORE v. REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, 51 Ca. 3d 120, 793 P.2d 479, 271 Ca. Rptr. 146 (1990).