Our Bodies, Whose Property

Dados Bibliográficos

ID19974450
AutoresA Phillips (0000-0002-0989-136X, autor correspondente)
Ano2013
Páginas202
Data de publicação2013-07-21
Open AccessSim
TipoBOOK
PeriódicoOur bodies, whose property? (SOURCE_BOOK)
EditoraPrinceton University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.23943/princeton/9780691150864.001.0001
OpenAlexW4301083094
Open LibraryOL26917747M
ISBN9780691150864
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas12

No one wants to be treated like an object, regarded as an item of property, or put up for sale. Yet many people frame personal autonomy in terms of self-ownership, representing themselves as property owners with the right to do as they wish with their bodies. Others do not use the language of property, but are similarly insistent on the rights of free individuals to decide for themselves whether to engage in commercial transactions for sex, reproduction, or organ sales. Drawing on analyses of rape, surrogacy, and markets in human organs, this book challenges notions of freedom based on ownership of our bodies and argues against the normalization of markets in bodily services and parts. The book explores the risks associated with metaphors of property and the reasons why the commodification of the body remains problematic. The book asks what is wrong with thinking of oneself as the owner of one's body? What is wrong with making our bodies available for rent or sale? What, if anything, is the difference between markets in sex, reproduction, or human body parts, and the other markets we commonly applaud? The book contends that body markets occupy the outer edges of a continuum that is, in some way, a feature of all labor markets. But it also emphasizes that we all have bodies, and considers the implications of this otherwise banal fact for equality. Bodies remind us of shared vulnerability, alerting us to the common experience of living as embodied beings in the same world. Examining the complex issue of body exceptionalism, the book demonstrates that treating the body as property makes human equality harder to comprehend

Aesthetics · Art · Autonomy · Business · Commodification · Economics · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Law and economics · Market economy · Object (grammar) · Political science · Property (philosophy) · Property law · Property rights · Reproduction · Sociology · Tangible property · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism · Capitalism · Freedom · History & Theory · Human body · Liberty · Ownership · Political · Property · Social Science · Women's Studies