Kara W. Swanson. Banking on the Body: The Market in Blood, Milk, and Sperm in Modern America.

Wilson, Duncan

doi:10.1093/ahr/120.3.1040

Cited by 5 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…19 These "frozen archives" (Anderson 2015) play a central role in the contemporary cryogenic regime. The term "bank" in this context is more than a metaphor (see Swanson 2014); it indicates that these collections transgress archival work and historical documentation. 20 Cryobanks function as a standing-reserve, as they are simultaneously repositories of stored biomaterial and active sites where it is processed for future use.…”

Section: Heidegger Stock and Disposition: Cryobanks As A Standing-res...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In contrast, it was only at the beginning of the new millennium that the cryopreservation of human oocytes became feasible (Gook 2011). However, the impact of cryobiology goes far beyond reproductive technologies affecting biomedical research, regenerative medicine, transplantation surgery, conservation biology, and biosecurity preparedness (Landecker 2007(Landecker , 2010Waldby 2008;Gottweis 2009;Chrulew 2011;Friese 2013;Swanson 2014;Lewis et al 2016;Keck 2017).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Welcome to Whenever: Exploring Suspended Life in Cryopreservation Practices

Lemke

2021

Science, Technology, & Human Values

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Cryopreservation practices have become increasingly important within contemporary life sciences in recent decades, opening up the perspective of modifying and modulating temporal pathways and developmental cycles. Exploring the concept of “suspended life,” this article first focuses on temporal liminality as cryopreservation practices operate by extending the present. I rely on Niklas Luhmann’s account of time, which advances the idea of an enduring present bound to the principle of reversibility. The second part of this article engages with the emergence of cryobanks. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s concept of the “standing-reserve” ( Bestand), I conceive of cryobanks as storing facilities that ensure the disposition of organic material. The third section discusses the advent of a “politics of suspension” based on the proliferation of cryogenic life in contemporary societies, which is defined by reversibility and disposition. The conclusion sums up the main argument and briefly points to the social and political repercussions of this mode of governing the future by prolonging the present.

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Section: Heidegger Stock and Disposition: Cryobanks As A Standing-res...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

Welcome to Whenever: Exploring Suspended Life in Cryopreservation Practices

Lemke

2021

Science, Technology, & Human Values

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“…Human milk banks have a long history that can be traced back to the medicalization of human milk and breastfeeding that began at the turn of the twentieth century. As Kara Swanson explains in her historical account of blood, milk, and sperm banks in the United States, the development of "milk stations" and other doctor-led initiatives since the 1910s led to breast milk being one of the first human tissues to be medically banked (Swanson 2014). First focused on maintaining medical control over wet nurses, disciplining their bodies and "souls" by monitoring their diet, habits, and behavior (Golden 2001), milk banks progressively resorted to providing samples of expressed milk preserved by the introduction of cooling and freezing devices.…”

Section: Background: the New Mobilities Of Breast Milkmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Cryopolitics of Human Milk: Thermal Assemblages of Breast Milk in Donation, Banking, and Bioindustrial Research

Bachiller

Domingo

2022

Science, Technology, & Human Values

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Cold is indispensable when preserving breast milk for later use in ordinary breastfeeding practices and, in addition to other devices such as the breast pump, fridges and freezers have been essential in making human milk a mobile biosubstance. Cryotechnologies become even more important when donated milk has to be preserved for the feeding of hospitalized babies or when, in the form of milk probiotics, it enters the realms of scientific research and industrial production. However, attention to cold only offers one side of the picture, as thawing and heating are essential processes in human milk circulation too. Drawing on research on milk banking practices in Spain, we present three instances where technologies of cold and heat are applied to human milk or its components: hospital banks that collect milk from donors; the practices of lactating women who donate part of their milk to hospital banks, share it informally with other women, or participate in clinical research; and biopharmaceutical companies developing cutting-edge nutritional products employing microbial strains obtained from breast milk. Each of these scenarios resorts to different technological manipulations of cold and heat, generating distinct thermal assemblages where technical questions and sociocultural logics are simultaneously at stake.

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“…People relate to things, and things relate to people. In some instances, as Kara Swanson describes, law and culture even turn people into things (Swanson 2014).…”

Section: Distinguishing Science and Technology Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

IP Things as Boundary Objects: The Case of the Copyright Work

Madison

2017

Preprint

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The goal of this article is to initiate the exploration of the meanings and functions of the things of intellectual property: the work of authorship (or copyright work) in copyright, the invention in patent, and the mark and the sign in trademark. The article focuses firstly on the example of copyright work. Relevant challenges are both technological and conceptual, because these things blend the material and the immaterial. Works are neither as clearly defined nor as clearly limited as copyright law often suggests they are. To explain and justify that proposition, the article borrows from information science literature exploring boundary objects, which are stable physical and intangible things that align distinct but overlapping communities of practice in flexible ways, via interpretive openness. The article shows that the meanings of the work in copyright law can be unified conceptually in the sense that the work operates as a boundary object across a number of different legal and cultural divides. This view of the work clarifies the distinct status of relevant communities and practices in copyright but also bridges them in copyright’s construction and governance of culture. None of the boundaries represented in these boundary objects is fixed or impermeable. Their very dynamic and sometimes porous character is precisely the governance role illuminated here.

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Kara W. Swanson. Banking on the Body: The Market in Blood, Milk, and Sperm in Modern America.

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

Welcome to Whenever: Exploring Suspended Life in Cryopreservation Practices

Welcome to Whenever: Exploring Suspended Life in Cryopreservation Practices

The Cryopolitics of Human Milk: Thermal Assemblages of Breast Milk in Donation, Banking, and Bioindustrial Research

IP Things as Boundary Objects: The Case of the Copyright Work

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