In the modern, globalized economy, outsourced labor to the Global South maintains the lives of those producing capital in the Global North. This state of economics is frequently described as neoliberal: the freedom of capital movement and the indoctrination of outsourced labor by marginalized groups. Furthermore, the neoliberal state exacerbates a class of feminized labor with origins in formerly colonized states. The outsourcing of labor to postcolonial states is a critical issue for Kalindi Vora in her book, Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor. In a struggle with definitions and mechanisms of labor, Vora succeeds in forming new concepts of reproductive labor with foundational examples from India’s working class. She expands on the inextricable link between reproductive labor and the body–a continuity from colonization to today. Additionally, Vora relies on feminist ethnography and definitions to centralize the identities of Women of Color who are the most frequently biocapitalized reproductive laborers.

Relying on the concepts of ‘biocapital’ and ‘biopower,’ Vora coins a new term, “vital energy,” with respect to the transfer of energies in the maintenance of capitalism. Vora contextualizes biocapital as a colonial-originated practice of indenturing people into subjected labor practices which continues in the modern neoliberal economy through signifying outsourced labor as less equal to the productive work of the colonizing state. In doing so, she uncovers the nuances of feminized, post-colonial and transnational labor relations. Vora employs previous feminist ethnographies and self-administered ethnography on surrogacy, call centers and IT-work in India to analyze reproductive labor outsourcing from the worker’s perspective. Throughout the book, she balances explaining the macro-level systems of power at play between the global North and South and sharing lived experiences captured in ethnography. The introduction and first chapter contextualize biocapital as a colonial-originated practice of indenturing people into subjected labor practices which continues in the modern neoliberal economy through signifying outsourced labor as less equal to the productive work of the colonizing state. Vora defines “vital energy” as the bodily energy used by workers who maintain the life of the productive economic system. 

Dr. Kalindi Vora employs her knowledge of history, social justice and technology to assist her interviews of Indian workers and analysis of previous ethnographies. Vora is a current professor at Yale University and director of the Feminist Research Institute at UC-Davis. She holds a PhD in History of Consciousness from UC-Santa Cruz. Her current research focuses on “historical and contemporary social justice concerns connected to artificial intelligence and robotics technologies, on autoimmunity and patient self-tracking and self-treatment, and on establishing approaches to research in STEM fields informed by feminist, anti-racist and other social justice standpoints” (Yale University). Other works by Vora include Technoprecarious (2020) and Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (2018), co-authored with Dr. Neda Atanasoski.

Vora begins her research in Life Support by analyzing the colonial underpinning of transnational reproductive labor. In the section, “Legacies of Imperial Labor,” Vora situates modern philosophies of labor systems as products of colonialism and slavery. For example, Vora battles with the consensuality of exploitive modern labor. The reproductive labor Vora analyzes is considered “consensual” in the modern economy, but it is the “unequal distribution” of freedoms which have led the transition to consensual labor from a history of enslavement. Vora considers the Assisted Reproductive Technologies Bill (2012) through which the government of India provides inadequate protection to surrogates. She argues that the Indian law leaves surrogates as a location for the free-market economy to commodify and exploit women’s bodies. Ultimately, Vora claims that there is no consideration of the relationship between the “surrogate’s social world and the infant she carries.” The contractual relationship with the commissioning parents which segregates the surrogate from the child instrumentalizes “freedom” to control and make invisible the activities of the surrogate including their sexual, gendered and inherently physical and mental labor. In following chapters, Vora employs previous ethnographic studies in addition to her own on reproductive laborers in India to understand the particularities of biocapital and the inseparability between the corporeal and labor. 

Vora uses call center agents as another example of reproductive labor. In analyzing previous ethnographies of call centers and representations of call center agents in popular media, Vora describes the personification of agents into their “data forms:” a projection of themselves which relies on Western cultural understandings and social cues. The agent is producing affective labor for the company. Vora uses this understanding of call agents to analyze discrepancies between capital accumulation in the US and “cheap service labor” in India. She argues that the vital energy which agents use to produce a personification is exported capital accumulated by economic actors in the US at the benefit of the corporation. In contrast, Indian labor is “cheapened” because the reproductive laborer’s positionality in the global economy does not allow for capital accumulation. Reaping capital from the body of service workers is what Vora describes as the transfer of “vital energy.”

Finally, Vora most prominently employs her own ethnography when analyzing IT-support centers in Bangalore, India. Vora acknowledges that her interviewees represent a higher class of IT workers who have the flexibility of working bi-continentally. Many IT workers in India do not have this luxury, but the experience of those interviewed highlights the discrepancies between the ‘software bro’ in Silicon Valley and Bangalore. Vora discovers that while Silicon Valley is a creative, developmental tech hub, IT workers in Bangalore are prescribed a script for their output. Indian engineers are commonly subjected to strenuous training and testing before being judged on their capability to then be fed to companies to produce pre-existing software. There is no “development” in the Indian sector of IT. One interviewee explains that the Indian vocational education system for engineering produces an environment with little innovative output. Vora claims that this cycle of reproduction “constrains” the worker from innovating solutions that could help their community, but rather produces capital for economic actors in the United States.

Vora’s central contribution is her definition of “vital energy.” This new term helps identify the transnational labor dynamics of the modern, globalized economy. “Vital energy” is able to grasp the impact of reproductive labor on the individual worker. Whereas much research on labor markets focuses on the market as a whole or macro level trade dynamics, Vora focuses on the individual labor as the source of economic reproduction. This transition from the market to the individual is critical to Vora’s analysis and understanding of biopower. Vital energy is a product of biopower which emanates from a capitalist system which indentures outsourced labor for the capital growth of the Global North. This analysis is a critical understanding of the neoliberal economy. 

To reach her understanding, Vora employs previous ethnographies and analysis of media representation. She acknowledges that her interpretation of someone else’s interpretation is twice removed from the source and could be highly flawed. Although she does ground her work in her own interviews with Indian IT workers and surrogates, her analysis of others’ ethnographic research may not be appropriate to pin on the individual worker; however, given the progress Vora makes in her research, I recommend this book to students in Economics, Biology, Computer Science, Sociology and Gender and Sexuality. Vora is successful in centralizing the individual worker and the person-level impacts of outsourced reproductive labor. Her analysis would be beneficial to students entering these fields as they encounter these globalized processes and think about their own positionality in the neoliberal economy.

Following my reading of Life Support, I am compelled to find other invisibilized reproductive labor practices. While Vora focuses on transnational labor, I wonder if there are examples of vital energy in domestic labor practices where the exchange does not rely on the veil of sovereign borders. Additionally, Vora admits that the production of vital energy is nearly impossible to quantify. This recognition reminds me that reproductive and home labor does not count towards our calculation of GDP which disproportionately reduces the contribution of women to our understanding of economic growth. I am curious to find a method for quantifying reproductive labor. While ethnographic research highlights the impact of exploitative labor practices and centralizes the labor of invisibilized workers, I argue that quantification could change public perception of this labor and increase visibility. 

Vora, Kalindi. Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.