Transhumanisms and Biotechnologies in Consumer Society offers new, critical perspectives on the impact of 'life-enhancing' technological advancements on consumer identity positions and market evolutions.
Technoprogressive innovations that include body modification technologies and reproductive technologies have enabled people to transcend bodily constraints. In parallel, they provoke necessary, critical interrogation around human capabilities, technological possibilities, gender equality, feminism, personal identity, bioethics, markets and morality. The contributions in this book re-evaluate these topics and elucidate some of the vexed relationships between consumers of biotechnologies and markets they consider restrictive or misleading. Secondly, by illustrating consumers’ questioning of and resistance to biomedical, market imperatives, they highlight how the notion of consumer sovereignty, consumer influence over markets, has now advanced into novel forms of consumer activism made manifest through contemporary health justice movements. The chapters in this book also uncover profoundly personal consumer accounts on coping with and managing bodies-in-transition, focusing on illness, self-perception, survivorship and the vicissitudes of these corporeal experiences. This book will allow readers to understand how accelerated technological market changes are being experienced and creatively countered at the societal and individual level.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Marketing Management.
Introduction: Live very long and prosper? Transhumanist visions and ambitions in 2021 and beyond… Jennifer Takhar, Rika Houston and Nikhilesh Dholakia 1. Transhumanism in speculative fiction Russell W. Belk 2. An IVF survivor unravels fertility industry narratives Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos 3. IVF survivorship, the IVF memoir and reproductive activism Jennifer Takhar 4. Social inequalities, reproductive bodies, and technological interventions Rene Almeling 5. Perfecting or selecting? When ‘kinds of children’ are the objective Ayo Wahlberg 6. The Promethean biohacker: on consumer biohacking as a labour of love Vitor M. Lima, Luís A. Pessôa and Russell W. Belk 7. Reproduction as consumption: unravelling the sociological shaping of reproductive tourism market in China I-Chieh Michelle Yang, Aminath Shaba Ismail and Juliana Angeline French 8. Dead metaphors and responsibilised bodies-in-transition: the implications of medical metaphors for understanding the consumption of preventative healthcare Mohammed Cheded, Chihling Liu and Gillian Hopkinson 9. Wearable technologies, brand community and the growth of a transhumanist vision Duygu Akdevelioglu, Sean Hansen and Alladi Venkatesh.
