Material and Metaphorical Possibilities of Gendered Microbes

• In Event: Nonhuman Innovations, Nonhuman Disruptions - II: Care & Mattering

Abstract

Microbial beings—as substantive and suggestive figures— emerge as central within current dialogic fields between scientific revelation and more-than-scientific speculations about living with more-than-human and human assemblages. These figures generate excitement in the escalating speed through which basic lab and metagenomic research prompts new scientific consensus, leaks into our models of how to live in more-than-human bodies, and disrupts boundaries between scientific and nonscientific management. Focused on elaborations of the vaginal microbiome as a site for troubling or reproducing particular forms of gendered relations, I examine the dynamic relationship between new insights into microbial materiality and our modelings of how (or why) such materiality matters. Close readings across an archive of gendered microbiome projects illustrates how the metaphors of and materiality of microbes seem at once inextricable from their human or animal proxy relations and yet to also render such relations newly open for for inquiry. I first analyze how microbes as materially slippery figures are enrolled to innovate or disrupt our modelings of the gendered human body and second I query after methodological possibilities for grasping the sites in which new possibilities of such relations cohere. Using cases from scientific efforts to align women’s reproductive life histories with their vaginal microbiome and from translational or “DIY” projects that emerge alongside traditional scientific domains, I trace the ways microbial possibilities— both materially and metaphorically—both create a space for more-than-human innovation and also disrupt existing speculations about the scope of such innovation.

Author

• Rebecca Howes-Mischel, James Madison University, Department of Sociology and Anthropology