Epigenetic life: biological plasticity, abnormality, and new configurations of race and reproduction

Abstract

Environmental epigenetics is a 'hot' new field of post-genomic science investigating mechanisms that influence how genes are expressed. It offers a dynamic and non-dualistic understanding of the relationship between environments, genes, bodies, and health. We ask how this new science of biological plasticity is changing existing concepts of normality and abnormality. We find that epigenetics is contributing to a new biological (yet non-determinist) ontology of race and that the fetus and reproductive women are emerging as the central figures in this new epigenetic model of race and bodily plasticity. We find that epigenetics is a science of variation in which biological difference is figured as both normal (inevitable) and abnormal (a sign of disruption); it then seeks to improve life by identifying therapies to cure epigenetic 'abnormalities'. In this way, epigenetics emerges as a reproductive science, in which the 'uterine environment' is figured as the key space-time of epigenetic becoming. We argue that in this focus on abnormality and improvement, epigenetics is tied to a eugenic logic, even as it rejects notions of genetic determinism. While it might seem that epigenetic models of plastic life should eliminate race by eliminating notions of discrete kinds given in nature, it appears that epigenetics offers a new form of racialization based on reproductive processes of becoming rather than on pre-given nature.

The ambiguous nature of epigenetic responsibility

“…Our framing thus focuses on the last two criteria and underscores two important ‘biological ambiguities’ inherent to epigenetic mechanisms themselves: ‘epigenetic normality’ (in relation to the criterion of obligation) and ‘epigenetic plasticity’ (in relation to the criterion of capacity). These ambiguities have already been reported and discussed by social scientists,17 21 22 but their important normative relevance has been largely overlooked.…”

Gendered imaginaries: situating knowledge of epigenetic programming of health

“…As many have argued (Mansfield ; Mansfield and Guthman ; Meloni ), the turn towards a gendered and individualised optimisation in epigenetics intersects in fact with several other societal issues, such as racialised questions about abnormality and pathologisation of social status. The responsibilisation of individuals with respect to the protection of their epigenome is, according to this view (Mansfield ), not moving us from fixed racial differences to a plastic understanding of biological variation (Mansfield and Guthman ). Rather, it entails the corollary of a racialised pressure to conform to a privileged and idealised (white) norm, as well as the intensification of arguments for biological differences in our societies that can be qualified as an ‘embodied race’ (Mansfield : 356).…”

What if the Environment is a Person? Lineages of Epigenetic Science in a Toxic China

“…Epigenetic research and its media representation in the United States and Australia have depicted the responsibility for epigenetically inherited conditions as the product of individual maternal behaviors such as smoking (Warin et al. ) or of essentialized behavioral patterns such as dietary intake (Mansfield and Guthman ). Epigenetic research that draws attention to, and only to, the mother as the source of future disease causality is certainly limited by assumptions of individuality underlying such research.…”

“…The material‐semiotic interworkings of this logic of maternal blame (see Haraway ) rely on an assumption of two individuals—a mother, depicted as a badly behaving vessel, and a developing fetus, the victim of the mother's exposures and behaviors. Working through an emphasis on the uterine environment, the mother is figured as the primary site of “epigenetic becoming” (Mansfield and Guthman , 6), where and when infants simultaneously archive the past and become the future. The mother, whose diet or behavior has impacted the fetus, is plucked out of any type of context—social, environmental, national, chemical—and turned into an individually responsible being, stripped of her surroundings (Landecker ).…”

“…Epigenetic theories of disease causality can reinforce these patterns of maternal blame for bodies gone awry by turning individual maternal behaviors or lifestyle choices into toxic exposures that impact fetal health (Mansfield 2012; Warin et al 2012). Epigenetic research and its media representation in the United States and Australia have depicted the responsibility for epigenetically inherited conditions as the product of individual maternal behaviors such as smoking (Warin et al 2012) or of essentialized behavioral patterns such as dietary intake (Mansfield and Guthman 2015). Epigenetic research that draws attention to, and only to, the mother as the source of future disease causality is certainly limited by assumptions of individuality underlying such research.…”