Full Description
The Body Productive represents a new and radical approach to the relationships between capitalism, work and the body. Self-evident, natural, biological - this is how we think of the body on an everyday basis. However, this supposedly most direct aspect of our being may in fact be a primary site of socio-economic mediation and ideological reproduction. How are bodies produced under capitalism? How, in turn, does capitalism make bodies productive? How is the body (and knowledge of the body) shaped by demands of production, consumption and exchange, and how can these logics be resisted, challenged and overcome?
These are the questions at the heart of The Body Productive, a collection of original, radical new approaches to the relationships between capitalism, work and the body from an international group of scholars and activists. Taking inspiration from the neglected theoretical work of François Guéry and Didier Deleule, and bridging Marxist and Foucauldian traditions, this book rethinks the relationships between the biological and the social; the body and the mind; power and knowledge; discipline and control.
Contents
1. Introduction: Rethinking Capitalism, Work, and the Body
Steffan Blayney, Joey Hornsby & Savannah Whaley
2. The Productive Body Revisited
François Guéry
2. The Productive Body Revisited
Dan Taylor
4. Corporeal and Abstract: Is There a 'Left Biopolitics' of Bodies?
Marina Vishmidt
5. Empty Promises: The Financialization of Labour
Phil Jones
6. The Dialectical Body: Bringing Science Back into Socialism
Graham Jones
7. Neither Appropriated nor Expropriated: Notes Towards an Autonomist Cripistemology of the Productive Body
Arianna Introna
8. The Quantified Self, the Ideology of Health, and Fat
Dawn Woolley
9. The Artefact of Losing: The (Bio)poetics of Miscarriage
Helen Charman & Christopher Law
10. Reproductive Data-Bodies: Privacy, Inequality and Anti-Abortion Politics in the Age of Platform Capitalism
Grace Tillyard
11. Algorithmic Capitalism, the New Machinofacture and the Productive Body
Stephen Shapiro & Philip Barnard
