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- Title
‘Health and ancestry start here’: Race and prosumption in direct-to-consumer genetic testing services.
- Authors
Merz, Sibille
- Abstract
This article argues that online direct-to-consumer genetic testing (DTC GT) companies such as deCODEme, 23andMe, and Pathway Genomics are not only paradigmatic of the participatory turn in scientific research, but also of the conflation of production and consumption in post-industrial capitalism. It analyses the activities of one of the largest DTC GT companies, 23andMe, to contend that, far from constituting a gift exchange, consumer participation represents a central aspect in the production of the company’s (bio)value. However, targeting especially African Americans and other participants with African ancestry with research projects such as Roots into the Future and the African Ancestry Project, 23andMe cannot be understood outside the racial logics of contemporary genomic research practices, and of (bio)capitalism more broadly. The article therefore focuses on the interrelations between production, consumption and the reproduction of racial categories in this particular form of corporate online research. It concludes that 23andMe relies for its success on both the labour of African American ‘prosumers’ and on the prior system of racial signification through which corporeal matter and genetic information only appear interesting. As such, it exemplifies that raciality operates precisely through the inclusion, not exclusion, of racial subjects, here into the circuits of user-generated value creation. The specificities of black (im)material labour therefore cannot be grasped by contemporary theories on post-Fordist capitalism but need a deeper engagement with the structural legacies of slavery, colonialism and racial violence.
- Subjects
PATHWAY Genomics Corp.; PRODUCTION management (Manufacturing); CAPITALISM
- Publication
Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization, 2016, Vol 16, Issue 3, p119
- ISSN
2052-1499
- Publication type
Article