![]() In this paper, I show that behind this simple definition are a range of iterations of tissue that need be accounted for if the term can be usefully and critically employed in sociology of health, the body, medicine, and science. Yet does this fully account for the variegated entities that we understand as tissue or the sometimes-contradictory applications of this term? How are tissues conceptualized in this work? In their book Tissue Economies (2006), scholars Cathy Waldby and Robert Mitchell use the term “tissue” in a “generic sense, to include blood, organs, and any other kind of living matter taken from the body” (Waldby and Mitchell 2006:4), a definition implicit in much of the literature. The explosion of biotechnological innovation in the last few decades has drawn the attention of many scholars who trace the circulation of tissues in the laboratories, bodies, institutions and politics they inhabit (see Landecker 2007 Waldby 2002a, 2002b Waldby and Mitchell 2006 Lock 2001 Kent et al. As such, in this paper I propose the notion of the “tissue-fragment” as a way to conceptualize these entities more fully in their biotechnological and embodied existence. While these processes have been elaborated in the literature, we lack a terminology that captures and accounts for them. tissue cultures), and sometimes becoming a new part of an existing body (e.g. biopsies), sometimes associated solely with a “laboratory life” (e.g. I argue that tissues represent a duality of fragmentation and wholeness, sometimes metonymically standing in for the body in which they originated (e.g. These tissue lives are contradictory, producing tissue as an intelligible and acceptable object as well as a contested and unstable one. Practices and heterogeneous collectives of actors, including histological study, organ donation, biopsies, hospital waste collection, and therapeutic uses of tissue products imbue tissues with complex social and cultural lives. Matter from bodies becomes tissue, rather than this being an ontological given. ![]() McGill Sociological Review, Volume 2, April 2011, pp.
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