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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.
List of contents
Introduction: Live very long and prosper? Transhumanist visions and ambitions in 2021 and beyond... 1. Transhumanism in speculative fiction 2. An IVF survivor unravels fertility industry narratives 3. IVF survivorship, the IVF memoir and reproductive activism 4. Social inequalities, reproductive bodies, and technological interventions 5. Perfecting or selecting? When 'kinds of children' are the objective 6. The Promethean biohacker: on consumer biohacking as a labour of love 7. Reproduction as consumption: unravelling the sociological shaping of reproductive tourism market in China 8. Dead metaphors and responsibilised bodies-in-transition: the implications of medical metaphors for understanding the consumption of preventative healthcare 9. Wearable technologies, brand community and the growth of a transhumanist vision
About the author
Jennifer Takhar is Associate Professor of Marketing and Communication at ISG Business School, Paris. Her research expertise includes gamete commodification, transhumanism and the marketing and advertising of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) in digital spaces. Her work is attentive to the rhetorical and literary strategies used to persuade consumers.
Rika Houston is Professor of Marketing at California State University, Los Angeles, where she also serves as Faculty Director of Community Engagement for the Center for Engagement, Service, and the Public Good. Her research explores gender and biotechnology in consumer culture, transformative consumer research, and sustainability.
Nikhilesh Dholakia is Professor Emeritus at the University of Rhode Island (URI), and Founding Co-editor of
Markets, Globalization and Development Review. Dr. Dholakia's research deals with globalization, technology, innovation, market processes, and consumer culture. His current work focuses on global, social and cultural aspects of technologies and media.
Summary
This book offers new, critical perspectives on the impact of “life-enhancing” technological advancements on consumer identity positions and market evolutions. It will allow readers to understand how accelerated technological market changes are being experienced and creatively countered at the societal and individual level.
