1 Bioethics Beyond Altruism 13(ethnoscapes), technologies (technoscapes), capital (financescapes),
images (mediascapes) and ideas (ideascapes), medical anthropologist
Marcia Inhorn ( 2011 ; Inhorn and Gürtin 2011 ) proposes the term
‘bioscape’ after Aditya Bharadwaj ( 2008 ), to capture the movement of
biological substances and body parts across transnational boundaries.
Inhorn’s ( 2015 ) concern is primarily with ‘reproflows’; that is, the cir-
culation of reproductive tissue and services and the phenomenon of
fertility travel and cross-border reproductive care (what she calls the
‘reproscape’ ), but the bioscape includes the circulation across geograph-
ical borders of all manner of somatic life—organs, tissues, gametes,
breastmilk, cell lines, DNA sequences, etc.—alongside actors, technolo-
gies, money, media and ideas, including values about moral and ethical
life.
In this ‘global assemblage’ (Collier and Ong 2005 ) of intensified bio-
flows, circuits of people (consumers, patients, donors, providers, vendors,
patient organisations, brokers, distributors, physicians, scientists, bioethi-
cists, lawyers, policy makers), objects and technologies, some of whom
are connected by narratives of altruism that promote the sharing of vital-
ity across local, national and global borders, produce commercial ben-
efit for medical and pharmaceutical institutions. These institutions not
only create biocapital or biovalue, but also trade in intimacies—the face
of immaterial labour that Michael Hardt ( 1999 : 90) refers to as affec-
tive (see Hardt and Negri 2000 ). In the context of health, fertility, and
biomedical experimentation, the immaterial products of affective labour
stretch across a range of emotional responses, from anticipation, hope,
and desire, to feelings of gratitude‚ worthiness, and relief. This affec-
tive labour reworks the moral boundaries defining the self and others‚
creating virtual or actual relationships‚ and communities and collective
subjectivities based around the transfer and exchange of body fluids, tis-
sues and organs. The generation of biovalue therefore not only depends
on the procurement of biological material and its productive trans-
formation; bioeconomies are reliant on the medical and technological
know-how of researchers and health professionals, as well as the ‘affec-
tive labour of human contact and interaction’ (Hardt 1999 : 95), which
involves the production and manipulation of emotion and intimacy.