Introduction: The gendered geographies of ‘bodies across borders’

Abstract

This paper introduces the articles that comprise the themed section ‘bodies across borders’ which investigates how the social and spatial dynamics of healthcare provision are being transformed by both neo-liberalization and globalization. The articles demonstrate how the central tenets of neoliberalism: the promotion of individual autonomy as realized through the instrument of consumer choice, the privatization, outsourcing and off-shoring of core competencies and service provision, the production of highly ‘flexible’ labour are at work in re-shaping access to, and delivery of, services in the domains of reproductive health, organ donation and globalized healthcare. In paying special attention to the ways in which these practices are cut across by class, gender and ethnicity, these accounts will hopefully encourage us to reject totalizing and homogeneous narratives of medical travel in favour of those that offer more nuanced understandings of the positionality of the individuals at the heart of them.