Mixed Race Bodies and Biomedicine: The Relational Politics of Blood Stem Cells

Clinical transplantation relies on donor/patient ‘compatibility’, a concept entangled with biological ideas of relatedness (i.e. relatedness generates genetic similarity). Transplantation requires donor recruitment to large databases/banks, mobilising ideas of a ‘vital public’ of donors and recipients, ethically entangled by embodied relatedness. These notions of relatedness are also informed by ‘race’. The article takes ideas of mixed race, an area neglected in social science of biomedicine, unpacking how the mixed race body (its genetic uniqueness) and mixed race bodies (our capacities for collectivity and relatedness) are refracted through the science of blood stem cell transplantation. It extends debates about racialising recruitment in biomedicine, demonstrating how mixed bodies trouble the standardised approach to enrolling racially minoritised ‘communities’ into biomedical projects like tissue donation. It offers novel insights of relevance for critical scholars of race and biomedicine, as well as recruitment practitioners themselves, into the powerful relational politics of blood.