Gendered bioeconomies

In their 2003 edited volume Remaking Life and Death, Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock used the term biocapital to describe the increasing entanglement of biotechnology with the economy. Much subsequent research, including Kaushik Sunder Rajan’s Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life, has explored how emergent biotechnologies intersect with processes of commercialization and market frameworks (Sunder Rajan 2006, p. 33; see also Chiapetta and Birch, this volume). In a 2008 review of biocapital research, Stefan Helmreich wrote, “The store of science studies work theorizing the conjuncture of economic action and contemporary biotechnology is now well stocked” (Helmreich, 2008, p. 463). Nearly a decade later, scholars continue to stock what have become multiple stores of bioeconomic research, further contributing to what Helmreich described as “articulations of biocapital and its kin” (Helmreich, 2008, p. 463).