Experience Anu

Claiming the body as property has been represented as the best way to ensure control over our own choices and lives; a crucial way of asserting our rights to bodily integrity; and an important means of protection against the abuse of our bodily materials by today's biotechnology companies. Refusing to see our bodies as property, it is argued, reflects either a religious view of the body as belonging to God, or a misguided sentimentalism that blocks clear thinking about matters such as prostitution, surrogate motherhood, and the sale of spare kidneys. Since we trade in our bodies whenever we work for a wage, there is no reason to view markets in sex or reproduction as a problem. Drawing on feminist arguments about the self as embodied, I argue that it is indeed a problem to think of the body as property, and a problem to view the body as a marketable substance. My minimal claim is that we do not need to assert property in the body in order to express what we mainly care about when we say ‘it’s my body’, which