Epigenetics, gender and population futures: reading 'the first thousand days' from South Africa

• In Event: Political Transformations of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) and Epigenetics in the Global South 1

Abstract

As of 2013, nutrition policy in the Western Cape Province in South Africa explicitly focuses on ‘the first thousand days of life’ measured from conception to two years of age. We show how within this focus, ‘the maternal’ has been cast as a key frame for interventions intended to produce ameliorated health outcomes for individuals (i.e. life-course based) and for future generations. This builds on longstanding discourses of maternal responsibility, indelibly shaped by histories of racial segregation, racism, structural violence, and the HIV epidemic. In contemporary discourse about risk and potential, the maternal figure is (again) materialized as the site of responsibility and intervention, linked with a moral discourse that extends care of the individual to care of the future and the population, and in the South African case, the 'future nation'. We demonstrate how policy ‘foregrounds’ certain categories of person and argue that attention to this process is important in understanding how policy settles in the tracks of earlier interventions. We conclude that the renewed focus on ‘the maternal’ is a ‘knowledge effect’ - the product of a specific way of asking and answering questions and anticipating knowledge horizons.

Authors

• Michelle Pentecost, Kings College London

• Fiona Ross, University of Cape Town