Commodification of Body Parts: By Medicine or by Media

become a prominent theme in contemporary debates about the body. These focus on how the reorganization of the boundaries of the body, and the recognition of new types of separable, exchangeable and reincorporable body parts (Rabinow, 1999) imply that the body is a form of merchandise. Commodification is frequently regarded as violating personal, social and community meanings for bodies. Bio-science and biomedicine have been seen to be overwhelmingly responsible for the growth in commodification of body parts, by creating new technologies to fragment and isolate bodily components to serve a variety of purposes, and allowing these to be exchanged in commercial transactions. Sharp (2000: 298), for example, points to the ways in which the medicalization of bodies leads them to be ‘quickly fragmented and transformed into scientific work objects’. The trade in transplant organs is a frequently cited example of such commodification (Scheper-Hughes, 2001a, 2001b), along with use of reproduc-tive tissue for therapeutic and research purposes (Bridges, 2002) and the commodification of DNA (Everett, 2003). The commodification thesis has some limitations; clearly not all forms of exchange of human tissues occur within commercial contexts. Whether th