Making Test Subjects: Globalized Clinical Labor and Affect in the Case of Transvaginal Mesh

• In Event: Affective Labors of Precarity, Precarities of Transnational Feminist Scholarship

Abstract

Through examination of how women around the world became test subjects for the expanded use of synthetic mesh in transvaginal repair surgeries, this paper puts in dialogue feminist scholarship on women’s reproductive and embodied labor with literatures on affect and the economic valuation of bodily capacities. The affective dimensions of transvaginal mesh have implications for transnational feminism, particularly that the largely-unregulated market for medical devices runs on surface knowledge, rather than on surveillance or big data, and reconfigures notions of research, treatment and consent in ways that do not map neatly onto divisions between the global north and global south.

Presenter

• Ariel Ducey, University of Calgary, Sociology