A Postgenomic Body

Abstract

This article sets the stage for a genealogy of the postgenomic body. It starts with the current transformative views of epigenetics and microbiomics to offer a more pluralistic history in which the ethical problem of how to live with a permeable body – that is plasticity as a form of life – is pervasive in traditions pre-dating and coexisting with modern biomedicine (particularly humoralism in its several ramifications). To challenge universalizing narratives, I draw on genealogical method to illuminate the unequal distribution of plasticity across gender and ethnic groups. Finally, after analysing postgenomics as a different thought-style to genomics, I outline some of its implications for notions of plasticity. I argue that postgenomic plasticity is neither a modernistic plasticity of instrumental control of the body nor a postmodernist celebration of endless potentialities. It is instead closer to an alter-modernistic view that disrupts clear boundaries between openness and determination, individual and community.

“It's Never Too Early”: Preconception Care and Postgenomic Models of Life

“…While life course models of intervention are linear and rooted in individual bodies, epigenetic models disrupt this linearity, offering repeated metaphors of "scaffolding" or "Russian dolls", i.e., of life enveloped within itself (Warin et al, 2015;Meloni, 2018). Social scientists return frequently to describe this in terms of strata or folds (Warin et al, 2015;Mansfield, 2017;Pentecost and Cousins, 2017).…”

“…Our concern is that, as scientific knowledge is a coproduction subject to social forces (Jasanoff, 2004 ), new research that seeks to understand preconception as an important window for intervention will continue to frame this in a way that is overly focused on female bodies, without the “epistemic modesty” (Pickersgill, 2016 ) that is perhaps necessary in what is a rapidly shifting area of research. Furthermore, the “temporal ambiguity” of the preconception period (Waggoner, 2013 , p. 356) is amplified in the DOHaD framework, which postulates epigenetic mechanisms and a view of life stages as a series of “folds” rather than linear sequences (Warin et al, 2015 ; Mansfield, 2017 ; Pentecost and Cousins, 2017 ; Meloni, 2018 ). Despite the positive possibilities of the kinds of relationality that the “postgenomic body” might afford, the pragmatic translation of the science most often reverts to a foregrounding of the maternal body and the female reproductive body as sites of intervention (Meloni, 2018 ; Pentecost and Ross, 2019 ).…”

The (De)materialization of Criminal Bodies in Forensic DNA Phenotyping

“…Body studies have made considerable contributions to problematize bodies as biologically given by outlining that bodies do not constitute a stable entity that remains unsettled over time; instead, they are subjected to change throughout life (Butler, 1993; Haraway, 1991). Such change can be enacted through voluntary intervention and/or through bodies being exposed to and altered by environmental influence (Lock, 2013; Meloni, 2018; Niewöhner, 2011).…”

“…(C01)Forensic DNA phenotyping is emerging and developing at a time when, due to a wide range of technological developments, the molecular domain is more readable than before (Rose, 2007). Simultaneously, it is also a time where the biological is increasingly more social (Franklin, 2003; Meloni, 2018) – that is, rendered as increasingly mutable and open to interference (Rose, 2007). This juxtaposition is constitutive of the (de)materialization of criminal bodies as it outlines how biology is not as a pregiven destiny but an opportunity to act upon (Rose, 2007).…”

Risk and the Spectral Politics of Disability

“…This is not the story of risk realized, but rather it dwells in spectral risk: speculative futures, ongoing monitoring and perpetual therapeutic controls. As we learn more about the indeterminacy of our genetic code, the fluidity of our inheritances, the dimensionality of our minds and the interplays and interdependencies between the molecules that compose us and the environments that contain us, we are confronted with the contingencies and multiplicities of a human biology with complex genealogies (Meloni, 2018). Vis-à-vis such contingencies and multiplicities, 'we would do well', Guthman and Mansfield (2015) implore, 'to learn to live with difference'.…”