Being Gutless

• In Event: Injury and Invisibility: Empiricism and Anti-Empiricism in Knowing Damage and Regeneration - II

Abstract

Drawing on disability studies and science and technology studies, this paper offers a foray into experiments with intestinal flora and microbial transplants as remedies for debilitating digestive disorders. Transplantation of “healthy” gut colonies into sick patients – who often are diagnosed with bacterial infections, including Clostridium difficile – often resolves digestive problems quickly, if not cleanly. Treatments lose their efficacy over time, suggesting that the “native” colony of a recipient slowly reasserts itself, including its ill effects and bacterial imbalances. Patients find themselves returning to donors for fresh transplants regularly, incentivizing them to maintain relationships with kin and friends, and to monitor those kin’s and friend’s health as a means to ensure “healthy” future donations. In this paper, I focus on patient narratives about knowing and not knowing what’s wrong with one’s gut, and what is happening with other people’s guts. Rather than cast their microbial colonies as lacking something, they see their guts as being too abundant and that the guts of others are more balanced. Such a view conceives of others – and their guts and what may or may not be in them – not as prosthetics that remedy one’s chronic conditions, but as resources to be cared for and sustained. Focusing on the relational aspects of microbial care points to the insufficiencies in medical and scientific knowledge and practice about guts and the need to conceptualize human digestion as a more-than-human and more-than-bodily process that relies on known and unknown agents in maintaining health.

Author

• Matthew Wolf-Meyer, Binghamton University