Living In-Flame: Crip Guts and More than Human Multiplicity

• In Event: Stories of Disability Liberation in Eastern Europe: Art, Migration, (De)institutionalization, and Ecology

Abstract

The human-microbial co-habitation has recently drawn attention of human, social and natural sciences alike. Discussions of metabolism and its biosocial contexts and intersection with social, racialised, gendered, ableist inequalities, interest in culturally specific fermentation practices, or role of precision fermentation for food production indicate that the microbial serves as a ‘starter’ in reconsiderations of more than human ecology and of the human-microbial interdependency. These debates reveal that the more than human ecology needs to be liberated from the androcentric insistence on the concept of a “human host” and of simplified understandings of human agency. They also indicate that disability as a conceptual tool needs to reach beyond the human and embrace more than human multiplicity.
Reflecting these issues, this paper interrogates the human-microbial relations at the moment of crisis. It grows out the research in the Czech Republic that centers experiences of disabled people living with inflammatory bowel diseases. Leaning against Rupa Marya and Raj Patel’s reframing of inflammation, I look at the severe disruption of metabolism caused by microbial imbalance as a materialisation of the environmental extractivism as well as of a crisis of more than human ecologies. The experiences of people living with ‘inflamed guts’ allow me to interrogate how they navigate life in ecologically compromised environments, how they keep the ‘flames’ under control, but most importantly, how living with ‘the flame’ enforces new forms of relationality to more than human lives, networks and communities.

Author

• Katerina Kolarova, Charles U in Prague (Czech Republic)