The Reproduction Of The Body
It is the technologies surrounding human reproduction which have moved fastest. We already have artificial insemination, infertility drugs, abortion, sperm banks, prenatal sex determination and preselection, IVF, embryo evaluation and transfer, foetal tissue transplant, and sperm-less conception. Clinics have opened offering a choose the sex of your baby service and gender specific abortion has already changed the gender balance in China and India. The consumer-designed baby is becoming a realistic option. Genetic engineering offers even more sophisticated possibilities - both for designer children engineered at conception and for "growing" new engineered faces or limbs.
The customised body produces customers for the body. Body parts and prostheses are commodified as new markets appear. Reproductive technologies are listed on the stock market and patents have been sought for human gene sequences. In the competitive world of sport, a market is developing for drug free urine. The dancer Cynthia Hess has successfully claimed the cost of her silicon breast implants as an allowable business expense on the basis that the operation had been a "marketing decision, akin to the cost of industrial retooling, which transformed her business prospects." The industrial metaphor is readily extended to human reproduction. Robert Graham, founder of the Repository of Germinal Choice, offers superior sperm of Nobel prize winners to women looking for choice.
Perhaps the most remarkable instance of the transmutation of the body, combining surgical, prosthetic and computer technology with consumerism, is that of the French professor and performance artist Orlan. Since 1990 she has altered her face and body through a series of performance art operations guided by a computer generated image to which her face is recut. She markets photographs and film of the surgical performances, as well as preserved body parts, complete with label saying This is my body, this is my software..
"Orlan" is not her name. Her face is not her face. Soon her body will not be her body.
When her self transformation is complete an advertising agency will select a new name consonant with her new image.
Prosthetics And The Virtual Body
The Reproduction Of The Body
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