Bio-Consumption: Stem Cell Treatments in India and the Making of A New Experimental Subject Population

While the overall objective is to write a book based on the research study conducted for my thesis, the specific objective of my stay would be to focus on the proposed chapter three, titled: Experimentality and the Making of Consumer Subjects: ‘Hopeful Risk’ and the New Middle Class. This chapter discusses how subject formation occurred through the treatment-seeking actions of respondents and the imaginings that were provoked, as experimentality was made to appear normal, possible and credible. The respondents, in becoming consumer-patients or consumer-families in their negotiation of a healthcare market, were also simultaneously transformed into experimental subjects as they made decisions to try stem cell treatments. The experiences patients and caregivers had of medical experimentation were embedded in the economic and social conditions of their existence, not only in terms of their ability to make certain choices but also in how they lived, and in their desire and tenacity to control the future.

Arguing the relationship between ‘bio-consumption’ and aspirational middle-class identity forms the essence of chapter three. The argument, however, needs to be strengthened further and located within new and additional research. For instance, stem cell experimentation as a new consumer practice needs to be located within the broader framework of “medical neoliberalism”, a term that not only implies a greater presence of the private sector in healthcare “but also…a cultural sensibility toward the commodification of health and wellness” (Fisher 2007:4). Private practice in India’s health system is a historical phenomenon, with its political economy of health being shaped by the country’s colonial past. What changed post the 1990s were structural reforms in India’s health sector that introduced the “commodification of health in new ways” as it did in other sectors of the economy, and in other parts of the world (Fisher 2007:4). What are these trends in healthcare that manifested with greater commercialisation of the sector and how do they fit into the broader narrative of middle class identity and the particular act of consumption of experimentation? Would it be possible, for example, to re-visit IVF in India, and in global literature, through the lens of class formation and find similarities in how assisted reproduction is also embedded within a middle class identity. There are different kinds of market-based, socio-technical arrangements that are present in India’s health system. Among these arrangements are those that are relatively new and tenuous, and also ones that are already familiar. Whether these embody an aspirational middle class identity need further investigation and understanding in order to strengthen the link between bio-consumption and what it means to be middle class in India not only in the ability to access the market, medicine and the media but in an attitude to living. 

The practice of stem cells as a marker of middle class activity is one of the key claims of this book and it is also a development that is unusual to the dominant discourse on human subject experimentation in India, and in the global south. Developing this chapter is therefore an important goal, and hence the proposed purpose of my stay.