Plasma donation at the border: Feminist technoscience, bodies and race

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Jennifer Hobbs argues that feminist technoscience studies can enrich our understanding of biopolitics by challenging the body’s boundaries and focusing on mundane practices of security.

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Institution: University of Leicester

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Jennifer Hobbs argues that feminist technoscience studies can enrich our understanding of biopolitics by challenging the body’s boundaries and focusing on mundane practices of security.

Image courtesy of interviewee. June 12, 2024

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This video is a detailed discussion about plasma donation, specifically focusing on the dynamics at donation centers located near the US-Mexico border. The conversation includes an exploration of a study addressing the practices of cross-border plasma donations, where Mexican nationals travel to the US to donate plasma. Key points include:

1. **Definition and Process**: Plasma donation centers allow individuals to donate the liquid part of their blood—plasma—using a method called plasmapheresis, which separates plasma from other blood components.

2. **Context of the Study**: The study investigates the racial and socioeconomic dynamics surrounding Mexican plasma donors and the contrasting representations of these donors in a context marked by violent and racist border politics.

3. **Biopolitics and Race**: The paper contributes to the literature on biopolitics, examining how state power's focus has shifted from life-death decisions to managing health and wellness but often overlooks the critical role of race in these discussions.

4. **Feminist Technoscience Studies**: The research utilizes this theoretical framework to analyze the intersection of science, technology, and the body, emphasizing the importance of considering everyday experiences in understanding biopolitical practices.

5. **Case Study Insights**: The study details the significant growth of plasma donation centers in proximity to the border, highlighting the economic reliance on Mexican plasma donors, who constitute a substantial portion of the US plasma supply.

6. **Contradictory Representations**: Mexican donors are depicted both as vital life-giving resources and as potential sources of disease. This video dual representation reflects long-standing racial anxieties associated with their nationality.

7. **Implications for Future Research**: The study calls for further investigation into the complexities of cross-border plasma donation and the exploitative interdependence between the US and Mexican donor populations.

8. **Political Context**: The discussion concludes by emphasizing the urgency of addressing the systemic racial issues surrounding health resources derived from marginalized communities, particularly as border politics remains a contentious issue in the US today.

Overall, the conversation highlights the intricate connections between health industries, race, national identity, and socio-political structures, calling for a deeper understanding and analysis of these relationships.

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X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

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In the paper I wanted to look at practices

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of cross-border plasma donations.

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So this is when Mexican nationals would cross from Mexico

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to the United States

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and attend plasma donation centers in the us.

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So I wanted to look at

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what was happening in those donation centers

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and find out a bit about

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how Mexican plasma donors were being represented.

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'cause I think there's this really interesting contradiction

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here where what we can see in the US

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around the border are these very violent

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and very racist forms of border politics.

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But at the same time, there's this thriving financial

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industry that is premised upon Mexican donors

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crossing the border to donate.

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So I wanted to look at what was going on there

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and kind of investigate some of the racial politics

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of that transaction.

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I see this paper as contributing in a lot of ways

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to literatures around biopolitics.

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Um, and part of the reason is

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because I think when people conduct biopolitical forms

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of analysis, they often return to the same scholars

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and the same kind of big names in order to do so.

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One of them obviously being fco.

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So the guy who kind of coined the term biopolitics for us

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and FCO was arguing

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that state power has transformed in recent decades.

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So we've moved from this primary expression

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and understanding of sovereign power as being the power

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to make people die, right?

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The state's the only one that can do that.

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And Fuco said, actually we're witnessing this shift towards

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states expressing their power in terms of their ability

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to make people live.

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So that's what biopolitics

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as a concept is kind of describing.

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Uh, so looking at how bodies have been made

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to live in certain ways in order to kind

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of regulate the health of, of the, the general population.

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Um, and there's lots of people who've taken up this idea

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and there's lots of kind of analysis about biopolitics,

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particularly thinking about state violence and border sites.

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Really cool. Love that literature, it's great stuff.

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But where that biopolitical literature has been critiqued is

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for the way, it has kind of not really accounted for race

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properly in thinking about this work.

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Um, so Biopolitics tends to talk about human

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and human matter

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and it kinds of tends to think about it in terms of,

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well we have this essential generic human biological matter

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and later on it kind of get gets marked

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with race in some way.

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So we have this essential generic human stuff

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and then we apply race on top of that.

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But what a lot of critical scholars have argued is

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that actually we don't have this human bit.

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That race then goes on to happen to, they've argued

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that race is part

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and parcel of the idea of the human itself.

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So we can't really separate them.

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And that's what some of the biopolitics literature I think

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has not done such a great job of handling.

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And so the literature that I'm trying to talk to is

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that biopolitics stuff.

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But in order to do so, I'm kind of saying, Hey look,

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what about feminist technoscience studies

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that might help us think about these questions about the

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politics of living and dying in a way

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that actually can help us get at race a

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little bit more directly?

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Feminist technoscience studies is a broad school.

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It is a form of literature that's quite difficult

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to categorize 'cause it does a bunch

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of pretty different stuff.

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But if we were gonna sum it up, I would say

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that it is a literature that kind

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of looks at the intersection between science set

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and technology on one hand and bodies

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and subjectivity on the other hand.

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So feminist Technoscience study says, well

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what happens when we plug ideas about science

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into concerns about bodies and subjects?

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Um, and the reason

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that I think it's super useful when we're talking about

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biopolitics is I think there are two key things

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that we can learn from this kind

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of feminist technological approach.

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So firstly, feminist technoscience can really help us

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challenge our understanding of

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where the boundaries of the body are.

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It helps us talk about bodies in a much more

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complicated way, I think.

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So feminist technoscience tends to see bodies

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as these very precarious and very kind of unstable objects.

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So it doesn't talk about bodies

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as just being limited by the skin, right?

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It sees them as this kind of much less certain

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and much more diffuse idea, which is really important.

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Um, I think when we apply that to plasma, we start

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to see these ideas about bodies

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and bodily matter being produced

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through the relationships they have with all these kind

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of scientific plasmapheresis technologies.

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So I think feminist technoscience can help us think about

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where the bodies of the boundary are,

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but I also think it can make us focus on the, the boring

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mundanes stuff of politics.

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And this is where the biopolitics literature I think also

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tends not to be super interested.

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Historically, we tend to go for the kind of high spectacle

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of border politics, right?

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So those very exceptional, and those quite like exciting

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and kind of really not normal moments of politics.

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But when we use feminist technoscience studies,

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our gaze is kind of redirected to think about the everyday

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and the normal processes of border politics.

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'cause Lozo plasma donation isn't very exciting.

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It's very boring. It involves a lot of sitting down,

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it involves a lot of waiting in line.

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It involves kind of endless cues and a lot of time.

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And I think feminist technoscience studies makes us think,

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okay, actually it's really important

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that we study the boring, mundane stuff of politics too,

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because that is a really vital site where power is kind

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of being circulated and being reproduced.

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So we've got all this feminist technoscience stuff in the

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background and that brings me to think about bioavailability

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as kind of a specific concept,

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that we can mobilize there.

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So this comes from the work of Cohen

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and bioavailability basically refers to the process

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by which a body becomes available for disaggregation.

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So we can break it down into lots of different parts

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and then we can redistribute those bodily parts

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and they can get reincorporated into other bodies.

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And that's what we see with plasma

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donation in many ways, right?

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So plasma donors are experienced disaggregation, part

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of them is taken out from their body

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and then it is redistributed to other bodies, right?

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It goes into other people

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and it becomes part of them instead.

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And thinking about the politics.

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So who's kind of benefiting from this scenario is

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what I'm trying to do in the paper.

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I'm looking at this specific case study

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of plasma donation centers

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that are located in super close proximity

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to the US Mexico border.

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And the number of those donation centers has been on a

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dramatic rise in recent years.

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The plasma industry has a pretty shady history

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of opening up donation centers, often in areas of town

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that are experiencing high levels of poverty.

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If you look to the literature, there's lots

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of stuff about plasma donation centers historically being

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found on kind of skid row, right?

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So very, very poor areas where there's kind of high levels

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of drug usage and so on.

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But border donation centers are

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what I am looking at in this paper.

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So in 2007, if we wind the clock back, there were 10

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plasma donation centers located in Texas in close proximity

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to their Mexican border.

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At the time I wrote this paper,

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so this is about two years ago now, 2021,

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there were already 19 centers in Texas,

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with another forthcoming.

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And I suspect that that number has increased even since

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I wrote this particular piece.

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So I think there's also something interesting about this

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case study when we look at it in a post covid context

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as well, because there has been a lot of recent fuss,

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and kind of legal dispute between plasma companies,

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and the customs and border patrol.

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So to give you a scale of like, sure, there's a lot

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of donation centers, but

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how important are these donation centers

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for the US plasma industry?

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Um, a contemporary lawsuit that is ongoing,

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suggests from some of the kind of biggest,

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biggest named players in the plasma industry.

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That plasma from Mexican donors makes up about 10%

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of the US global supply.

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So that's a hugely disproportionate percentage

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of a global supply

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that is coming from just Mexican nationals, right?

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This is four states pretty much

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that we're talking about here.

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So it makes up an enormous proportion, of

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that particular industry

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and to figure out how these Mexican donors

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were being kind of represented.

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What I did was I read a bunch of industry literature,

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so a lot of trade magazines, a lot of literature from kind

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of key companies

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and a lot of corporate documents as well as looking at a lot

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of the media and press reporting

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of Mexican donors specifically.

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And what emerged was

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that there were two really interesting ways in which plasma

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donors were being talked about

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and they were quite directly contradictory ways as well.

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So on the one hand,

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Mexican plasma donors were being represented as kind

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of these life giving entities, these kind of sources

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of health and vitality in the form of plasma products.

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Um, all of this language around, you know, kind of the gift

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of life is very prominent in industry literatures.

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Um, but what we can see

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and what feminist technoscience studies helps us see is

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that there's also this application of like really technical

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and scientific language going on.

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So plasma gets referred to as a unit,

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extra corporeal volume.

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There's a lot of kind of talk about the scientific

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processes of extraction.

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So there's a lot of quite disembodied

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technical language going on here.

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And I, I think, and I argue in the paper that

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what happens is that donor bodies get rendered

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as sites from which this kind of valuable raw material

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of health stuff

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of life can be extracted from Mexican donor bodies

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and redistributed to other people at the other end

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of the medical chain.

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So this is quite a des subjectifying way

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of talking about Mexican donors.

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Um, Mexican bodies kind of get represented then not

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as valuable in and of themselves or as people,

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but as places where we can extract life

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and we can give it to other people as well.

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And on the one hand, this is kind of true

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of all plasma donors, right?

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They are all being kind of figured

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and represented in these ways.

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But I think the key difference is

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that when white US citizens are donating plasma,

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their donations are not being performed within a

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geopolitical context that is dubious by virtue

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of their nationality, of their right to be within

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that space in the first place, right?

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It's the same process, but it's very different,

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like a very different and difficult political context.

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So Mexican donors are donating plasma within these

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borderland spaces where we often hear discourses about

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Mexicans being unwanted as human beings on US soil, right?

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So we don't want them here, but it's fine that they come

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and donate plasma because we can give that to other people.

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So we've got this kind of ambiguous discourse about them

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being life giving, which I don't think is very progressive

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or liberating for Mexican donors in any way.

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But at the same time, there's a real discourse about Mexican

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donors as being quite dangerous

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and it's a lot of racial anxiety about the potential

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for disease from Mexican donors here.

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So Mexican donors

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and borderland donation centers are often singled out within

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industry literatures in discussions about the risk

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of disease within this process.

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There's sometimes this fear about kind of novel pathogens,

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poten, you know, diseases we've never heard

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of emerging from Mexico.

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And it really ties into like a long colonial history

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of representing Mexico as kind of dirty

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and diseased in comparison to what we imagine

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to be the clean disease-free United States.

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So during the earlier 20th century, there were a lot

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of hygiene practices in place along the US Mexico border

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including things like, hosing down Mexican laborers,

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dousing them with kerosenes, stripping them naked

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and so on and so forth.

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Because the colonial discourse at the time was Mexico is

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this kind of scary unhygienic dirty place and it might come

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and contaminate our lovely clean white American spaces.

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So the circulation

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of racialized body matter has long been a source

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of anxiety within the United States.

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And I think what we can see in this discourse

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of Mexican donors as potentially being a higher disease risk

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than white American donors is that all those attempts

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to objectify plasma to remove it from Mexican bodies

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to make it this kind of anonymous, safe, clean,

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technical medical product, all of those attempts actually

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fail because what we can see is plasma from Mexican donors

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being produced as racialized matter through the repetition

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of these discourses about disease.

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I think there are a couple of takeaways from this paper.

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I think I'm thinking about

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theoretical takeaways in particular.

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So what I'm trying to, what I want people

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to walk away from here is with an understanding

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that feminist technoscience is a useful literature for us

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to approach conversations about biopolitics.

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We don't just have to do it in the established language

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of Biopolitics,

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but there are other fields of literature

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that can really help us to kind of see new things

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and focus on new things when we conduct

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these investigations.

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So I think for feminist technoscience, it demonstrates

13:05.305 --> 13:07.145
to us this idea that the human,

13:07.645 --> 13:09.905
it doesn't precede other markers of identity.

13:10.005 --> 13:12.425
It doesn't come before considerations about race

13:12.765 --> 13:14.145
as I focus on in this paper.

13:14.805 --> 13:17.105
Um, but it's part and parcel of race.

13:17.105 --> 13:19.745
That's how we get the human right, doesn't exist first.

13:20.135 --> 13:21.825
It's part and parcel. Um,

13:21.965 --> 13:24.385
and I think feminist technoscience also points us

13:24.385 --> 13:26.505
to look at the role of the mundane

13:26.805 --> 13:29.505
and the everyday practices within Biopolitics.

13:29.505 --> 13:31.145
They might not be exciting,

13:31.255 --> 13:33.665
they might not be high stakes endeavors

13:33.665 --> 13:36.865
of national security, but they're all ways in which these

13:36.865 --> 13:40.625
ideas around power borders, identity, nationality,

13:40.815 --> 13:44.505
race citizenship is in these everyday encounters

13:44.935 --> 13:49.265
that these ideas are being continually created and rere.

13:49.645 --> 13:52.465
So it's really important that we look at the mundane stuff

13:52.685 --> 13:53.985
of border politics too.

13:54.605 --> 13:57.245
And I think when we look at

13:58.105 --> 14:01.085
how Mexican donors then are materialized as this kind

14:01.085 --> 14:04.525
of racialized health resource, there are a body that be,

14:04.785 --> 14:07.125
can be disassembled for the benefit of others,

14:07.585 --> 14:11.765
but they're also not allowed not to have a body in the words

14:11.765 --> 14:12.885
of Donna Harrow, right?

14:12.905 --> 14:14.285
And neither is their plasma.

14:14.285 --> 14:17.285
They're not actually allowed to lose their mexicanness

14:17.905 --> 14:20.085
in the donation process no matter

14:20.145 --> 14:21.845
how hard we try to make it.

14:21.965 --> 14:24.045
So we are still bringing all these kind

14:24.045 --> 14:26.685
of racial anxieties about disease to the table.

14:27.345 --> 14:30.525
So I think it also points to a need for further research.

14:30.525 --> 14:33.685
There's not really been a lot done about plasma donation

14:34.105 --> 14:36.245
or even about cross-border plasma donation.

14:36.785 --> 14:40.045
So I think it can be a really useful area for future

14:40.565 --> 14:42.925
research as it helps us think about the violence

14:43.025 --> 14:46.045
of colonial interdependence in a lot of ways, right?

14:46.355 --> 14:50.525
That this is a kind of big US global industry that both

14:51.295 --> 14:55.245
Fears and needs Mexican donors for its business practices.

14:55.705 --> 14:58.325
And we can see how those kind of colonial relations

14:58.325 --> 15:02.405
of interdependence, exploitative interdependence

15:03.325 --> 15:06.125
continue today in kind of a, some quite different

15:06.125 --> 15:09.445
and some quite dispersed geographical sites.

15:09.745 --> 15:12.405
And all of this feels like especially

15:13.405 --> 15:16.325
pressing now when we think about American border politics.

15:16.435 --> 15:19.485
It's, it's not that the US Mexico border has ever been a

15:19.685 --> 15:22.965
peaceful, or nonviolent place since its inception,

15:23.465 --> 15:26.245
but you know, when we're seeing things like border patrol

15:26.245 --> 15:28.565
officers mounted on horseback chasing migrants

15:28.565 --> 15:31.165
with bull whips, then thinking about the kind of many,

15:31.165 --> 15:34.325
many ways in which these ideas about the border continue

15:34.325 --> 15:35.565
to harm and continue

15:35.565 --> 15:37.805
to racialize people feels like quite

15:38.165 --> 15:39.245
pressing political work.

15:39.685 --> 15:39.885
I think.

"Exploring Cross-Border Plasma Donations: The Intersection of Racial Politics and Biopolitics"

00:00:00 - In the paper I wanted to look at practices of cross-border plasma donations. So this is when Mexican nationals would cross from Mexico to the United States and attend plasma donation centers in the us. So I wanted to look at what was happening in those donation centers and find out a bit about how Mexican plasma donors were being represented. 'cause I think there's this really interesting contradiction here where what we can see in the US around the border are these very violent and very racist forms of border politics. But at the same time, there's this thriving financial industry that is premised upon Mexican donors crossing the border to donate. So I wanted to look at what was going on there and kind of investigate some of the racial politics
00:00:43 - I see this paper as contributing in a lot of ways to literatures around biopolitics. and part of the reason is because I think when people conduct biopolitical forms of analysis, they often return to the same scholars and the same kind of big names in order to do so. One of them obviously being fco. So the guy who kind of coined the term biopolitics for us and FCO was arguing that state power has transformed in recent decades. So we've moved from this primary expression and understanding of sovereign power as being the power to make people die, right? The state's the only one that can do that. And Fuco said, actually we're witnessing this shift towards
00:01:25 - to make people live. So that's what biopolitics as a concept is kind of describing. so looking at how bodies have been made to live in certain ways in order to kind of regulate the health of, of the, the general population. and there's lots of people who've taken up this idea and there's lots of kind of analysis about biopolitics, particularly thinking about state violence and border sites. Really cool. Love that literature, it's great stuff. But where that biopolitical literature has been critiqued is for the way, it has kind of not really accounted for race properly in thinking about this work. so Biopolitics tends to talk about human
00:02:08 - and it kinds of tends to think about it in terms of, well we have this essential generic human biological matter and later on it kind of get gets marked with race in some way. So we have this essential generic human stuff and then we apply race on top of that. But what a lot of critical scholars have argued is that actually we don't have this human bit. That race then goes on to happen to, they've argued that race is part and parcel of the idea of the human itself. So we can't really separate them. And that's what some of the biopolitics literature I think has not done such a great job of handling. And so the literature that I'm trying to talk to is that biopolitics stuff. But in order to do so, I'm kind of saying, Hey look,
00:02:51 - that might help us think about these questions about the politics of living and dying in a way that actually can help us get at race a little bit more directly? Feminist technoscience studies is a broad school. It is a form of literature that's quite difficult to categorize 'cause it does a bunch of pretty different stuff. But if we were gonna sum it up, I would say that it is a literature that kind of looks at the intersection between science set and technology on one hand and bodies and subjectivity on the other hand. So feminist Technoscience study says, well what happens when we plug ideas about science into concerns about bodies and subjects? and the reason
00:03:32 - biopolitics is I think there are two key things that we can learn from this kind of feminist technological approach. So firstly, feminist technoscience can really help us challenge our understanding of where the boundaries of the body are. It helps us talk about bodies in a much more complicated way, I think. So feminist technoscience tends to see bodies as these very precarious and very kind of unstable objects. So it doesn't talk about bodies as just being limited by the skin, right? It sees them as this kind of much less certain and much more diffuse idea, which is really important. I think when we apply that to plasma, we start

"Exploring the Mundane Politics of Cross-Border Plasma Donation: A Critical Analysis through Feminist Technoscience"

00:04:12 - and bodily matter being produced through the relationships they have with all these kind of scientific plasmapheresis technologies. So I think feminist technoscience can help us think about where the bodies of the boundary are, but I also think it can make us focus on the, the boring mundanes stuff of politics. And this is where the biopolitics literature I think also tends not to be super interested. Historically, we tend to go for the kind of high spectacle of border politics, right? So those very exceptional, and those quite like exciting and kind of really not normal moments of politics. But when we use feminist technoscience studies,
00:04:56 - and the normal processes of border politics. 'cause Lozo plasma donation isn't very exciting. It's very boring. It involves a lot of sitting down, it involves a lot of waiting in line. It involves kind of endless cues and a lot of time. And I think feminist technoscience studies makes us think, okay, actually it's really important that we study the boring, mundane stuff of politics too, because that is a really vital site where power is kind of being circulated and being reproduced. So we've got all this feminist technoscience stuff in the background and that brings me to think about bioavailability as kind of a specific concept, that we can mobilize there.
00:05:35 - and bioavailability basically refers to the process by which a body becomes available for disaggregation. So we can break it down into lots of different parts and then we can redistribute those bodily parts and they can get reincorporated into other bodies. And that's what we see with plasma donation in many ways, right? So plasma donors are experienced disaggregation, part of them is taken out from their body and then it is redistributed to other bodies, right? It goes into other people and it becomes part of them instead. And thinking about the politics. So who's kind of benefiting from this scenario is what I'm trying to do in the paper. I'm looking at this specific case study
00:06:16 - that are located in super close proximity to the US Mexico border. And the number of those donation centers has been on a dramatic rise in recent years. The plasma industry has a pretty shady history of opening up donation centers, often in areas of town that are experiencing high levels of poverty. If you look to the literature, there's lots of stuff about plasma donation centers historically being found on kind of skid row, right? So very, very poor areas where there's kind of high levels of drug usage and so on. But border donation centers are what I am looking at in this paper. So in 2007, if we wind the clock back, there were 10
00:07:02 - to their Mexican border. At the time I wrote this paper, so this is about two years ago now, 2021, there were already 19 centers in Texas, with another forthcoming. And I suspect that that number has increased even since I wrote this particular piece. So I think there's also something interesting about this case study when we look at it in a post covid context as well, because there has been a lot of recent fuss, and kind of legal dispute between plasma companies, and the customs and border patrol. So to give you a scale of like, sure, there's a lot of donation centers, but how important are these donation centers
00:07:42 - a contemporary lawsuit that is ongoing, suggests from some of the kind of biggest, biggest named players in the plasma industry. That plasma from Mexican donors makes up about 10% of the US global supply. So that's a hugely disproportionate percentage of a global supply that is coming from just Mexican nationals, right? This is four states pretty much that we're talking about here. So it makes up an enormous proportion, of that particular industry and to figure out how these Mexican donors were being kind of represented. What I did was I read a bunch of industry literature,

"Contradictory Narratives: The Racialized Representation of Mexican Plasma Donors in U.S. Medical Discourse"

00:08:23 - of key companies and a lot of corporate documents as well as looking at a lot of the media and press reporting of Mexican donors specifically. And what emerged was that there were two really interesting ways in which plasma donors were being talked about and they were quite directly contradictory ways as well. So on the one hand, Mexican plasma donors were being represented as kind of these life giving entities, these kind of sources of health and vitality in the form of plasma products. all of this language around, you know, kind of the gift of life is very prominent in industry literatures. but what we can see and what feminist technoscience studies helps us see is
00:09:05 - and scientific language going on. So plasma gets referred to as a unit, extra corporeal volume. There's a lot of kind of talk about the scientific processes of extraction. So there's a lot of quite disembodied technical language going on here. And I, I think, and I argue in the paper that what happens is that donor bodies get rendered as sites from which this kind of valuable raw material of health stuff of life can be extracted from Mexican donor bodies and redistributed to other people at the other end of the medical chain. So this is quite a des subjectifying way
00:09:45 - Mexican bodies kind of get represented then not as valuable in and of themselves or as people, but as places where we can extract life and we can give it to other people as well. And on the one hand, this is kind of true of all plasma donors, right? They are all being kind of figured and represented in these ways. But I think the key difference is that when white US citizens are donating plasma, their donations are not being performed within a geopolitical context that is dubious by virtue of their nationality, of their right to be within that space in the first place, right? It's the same process, but it's very different, like a very different and difficult political context.
00:10:27 - borderland spaces where we often hear discourses about Mexicans being unwanted as human beings on US soil, right? So we don't want them here, but it's fine that they come and donate plasma because we can give that to other people. So we've got this kind of ambiguous discourse about them being life giving, which I don't think is very progressive or liberating for Mexican donors in any way. But at the same time, there's a real discourse about Mexican donors as being quite dangerous and it's a lot of racial anxiety about the potential for disease from Mexican donors here. So Mexican donors and borderland donation centers are often singled out within industry literatures in discussions about the risk
00:11:09 - There's sometimes this fear about kind of novel pathogens, poten, you know, diseases we've never heard of emerging from Mexico. And it really ties into like a long colonial history of representing Mexico as kind of dirty and diseased in comparison to what we imagine to be the clean disease-free United States. So during the earlier 20th century, there were a lot of hygiene practices in place along the US Mexico border including things like, hosing down Mexican laborers, dousing them with kerosenes, stripping them naked and so on and so forth. Because the colonial discourse at the time was Mexico is this kind of scary unhygienic dirty place and it might come
00:11:53 - So the circulation of racialized body matter has long been a source of anxiety within the United States. And I think what we can see in this discourse of Mexican donors as potentially being a higher disease risk than white American donors is that all those attempts to objectify plasma to remove it from Mexican bodies to make it this kind of anonymous, safe, clean, technical medical product, all of those attempts actually fail because what we can see is plasma from Mexican donors being produced as racialized matter through the repetition of these discourses about disease.

"Rethinking Biopolitics: Feminist Technoscience and the Everyday Politics of Race and Identity"

00:12:33 - I think I'm thinking about theoretical takeaways in particular. So what I'm trying to, what I want people to walk away from here is with an understanding that feminist technoscience is a useful literature for us to approach conversations about biopolitics. We don't just have to do it in the established language of Biopolitics, but there are other fields of literature that can really help us to kind of see new things and focus on new things when we conduct these investigations. So I think for feminist technoscience, it demonstrates to us this idea that the human, it doesn't precede other markers of identity. It doesn't come before considerations about race
00:13:14 - but it's part and parcel of race. That's how we get the human right, doesn't exist first. It's part and parcel. and I think feminist technoscience also points us to look at the role of the mundane and the everyday practices within Biopolitics. They might not be exciting, they might not be high stakes endeavors of national security, but they're all ways in which these ideas around power borders, identity, nationality, race citizenship is in these everyday encounters that these ideas are being continually created and rere. So it's really important that we look at the mundane stuff of border politics too.
00:13:58 - how Mexican donors then are materialized as this kind of racialized health resource, there are a body that be, can be disassembled for the benefit of others, but they're also not allowed not to have a body in the words of Donna Harrow, right? And neither is their plasma. They're not actually allowed to lose their mexicanness in the donation process no matter how hard we try to make it. So we are still bringing all these kind of racial anxieties about disease to the table. So I think it also points to a need for further research. There's not really been a lot done about plasma donation or even about cross-border plasma donation.
00:14:40 - research as it helps us think about the violence of colonial interdependence in a lot of ways, right? That this is a kind of big US global industry that both Fears and needs Mexican donors for its business practices. And we can see how those kind of colonial relations of interdependence, exploitative interdependence continue today in kind of a, some quite different and some quite dispersed geographical sites. And all of this feels like especially pressing now when we think about American border politics. It's, it's not that the US Mexico border has ever been a
00:15:39 - but you know, when we're seeing things like border patrol officers mounted on horseback chasing migrants with bull whips, then thinking about the kind of many, many ways in which these ideas about the border continue to harm and continue to racialize people feels like quite pressing political work. I think.

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Plasma donation at the border: Feminist technoscience, bodies and race

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