ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the gendered meanings that are attached to the commercial kidney provision amongst men who are providers in Manila, the Philippines. In broad discussions of organ trafficking, the links between constructions and performances of masculinity for economically and socially marginal men and commercial organ provision may be missed in accounts only focusing on men's exploitation without attending to the complex ways exploitation and marginalisation may be intertwined with gendered idioms. This is in line with some recent scholarship on commercial transplantation that suggests that the meanings of these transactions for providers, though deeply embedded in economic imperatives associated with poverty and family insecurity, also extend beyond these concerns, at least for men. Discussion of the intersection between masculine notions of heroism and commercial organ provision in Manila demonstrate the spectacle inherent in the circulation of media images of scarred bodies and tragic narratives of trafficking victims' as they also move across borders.