From Mother/Fetus to Holobiont(s): A Material Feminist Ontology of the Pregnant Body

Takeshita, Chikako

doi:10.28968/cftt.v3i1.28787

Cited by 45 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…For example, Myra Hird 2009shows how we have evolved with bacteria over millennia, and how it is impossible to establish where the human ends and other species begin. Chikako Takeshita and Stefanie Fishel have developed similar arguments, respectively, in relation to the entanglement of mother and foetus in pregnancy (Takeshita, 2017) and the rethinking of states through microbial life (Fishel, 2017). If human and nonhuman life are ontologically inseparable, then immune systems need to be able to deal with inseparability that does not fall within the traditional immunological framework of self and nonself.…”

Section: Conceptualisations and Critiques Of Immunitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Partial Immunities: Rethinking Communities and Belonging through Viral Memories of Influenza

Oikkonen

2018

Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture a

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The article explores the concept of partial immunities-our past infections providing partial protection against new related epidemics-in order to develop feminist tools for rethinking communities and belonging as situated and inherently multiple. Partial immunities challenge the idea of immunity as defence/defeat and absence/presence, allowing us to approach immunity as never fully achieved and as arising from historical coincidence rather than personal strength. The article investigates these issues through influenza. It argues that partial immunities to influenza highlight the historical layering of communal ties and interspecies entanglements. The concept of partial immunities enables us to conceptualise belonging as multiple, constantly changing, and technologically enacted. The article develops this argument through two analyses, one focusing on current attempts to create a universal influenza vaccine and one centring on the ways in which past epidemics enact invisible immunological communities across time and space.

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Section: Conceptualisations and Critiques Of Immunitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Partial Immunities: Rethinking Communities and Belonging through Viral Memories of Influenza

Oikkonen

2018

Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture a

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“…For example, Myra Hird (2009) shows how we have evolved with bacteria over millennia, and how it is impossible to establish where the human ends and other species begin. Chikako Takeshita and Stefanie Fishel have developed similar arguments, respectively, in relation to the entanglement of mother and foetus in pregnancy (Takeshita, 2017) and the rethinking of states through microbial life (Fishel, 2017). If human and nonhuman life are ontologically inseparable, then immune systems need to be able to deal with inseparability that does not fall within the traditional immunological framework of self and nonself.…”

Section: Conceptualisations and Critiques Of Immunitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Embodied phenomena such as pregnancy, and practices such as organ and tissue transplantation, have shed light on the complexities of immunity by demonstrating how a lack of immune response to 'foreign' biological material -immunological tolerance -is sometimes crucial for the preservation of life (e.g. Takeshita, 2017). Furthermore, a growing understanding of autoimmunity as underlying a range of diseases such as type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, celiac disease, rheumatoid arthritis and narcolepsy, has problematised the assumption that the immune system automatically recognises and defends against foreign biological material.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Office¹

2018

Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture a

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Founded in 2017, Feminist Encounters is a journal committed to argument and debate, in the tradition of historical feminist movements. In the wake of the growing rise of the Right across the world, openly neo-fascist national sentiments, and rising conservative populism, we feminists all over the world are needing to remobilise our energies to protect and advance gender rights. Feminist Encounters provides a forum for feminist theorists, scholars, and activists to communicate with each other, to better educate ourselves on international issues and thus promote more global understanding, and to enhance our critical tools for fighting for human rights. Feminism is an intellectual apparatus, a political agenda, and a programme for social change. Critical analysis of how gender discourses produce cultural identities and social practices within diverse lived realities is key to this change. We need to think more sharply in order to strategise well: as the discourses of conservatism renew and invigorate themselves, so we as feminist scholars need to be refining our amazonic swords in order not just to respond effectively but also to innovate our own ideas for equality and social justice. We are, of course, committed to intersectionality, a vital lens through which to see the contours of race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, age/ability, and explore how gendered scripts get lived, and filtered through these specificities of cultural organisation. Lived experience is never codified in terms of gender alone, and so our research will always be sensitive to the nexus of lived oppressions. The journal has a large editorial board and journal team, consisting of over forty scholars in twenty countries. This is deliberately inclusive in order that we can promote diversity and engage with different concerns from across the world. Our aim is not to simply talk to ourselves, reconfirming our localised assumptions, but to generate feminist encounters across regions, even if this is sometimes uncomfortable. Globalisation has been a triumph of neoliberalism, but digital technologies have also flattened and reduced the distance between us in dramatic ways, so that now we can talk to each other with unanticipated ease. This new access to each others' voices has also brought challenges to the way we think and do things, so that being a feminist today might be quite a different prospect to a person living in China, Iran, Norway, South Africa or the UK. Second Wave Feminism used the idea of 'sisterhood' to invoke solidarity between women. I've always rather liked Andrea Dworkin's claim, though, that: "Feminism is a political practice of fighting male supremacy in behalf of women as a class, including all the women you don't like, including all the women you don't want to be around, including all the women who used to be your best friends whom you don't want anything to do with anymore." The notion of sisterhood was challenged by Black feminists in the 1980s as being too conceptually white, thus bell hooks' trenchant critique that: "the idea o...

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“…Chikako Takeshita (2017), credited above with the term "motherfetus," starts from the materialist premise that a "fetus" is not preexistent as an object with a distinct agency that interacts with the "mother." Discussing the role of symbiotic bacteria (the microbiome) in human reproduction, she deconstructs pregnancy as a bidirectional exchange of substances and instead frames it as a symbiotic process involving complex networks of microbial activity.…”

Section: Materials Interconnectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Purity is Not the Point

Ford¹

2020

Catalyst

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Environmental chemical toxicity evokes both individual action and relational interconnection. On the one hand, there is the diffusion of risk and harm through time and space, which complicates assigning fault, responsibility, or regulatory jurisdiction. On the other hand, toxicity begs the question of what individuals can do to feel a sense of agency and mitigate the damage done by daily necessities of living. I call this tension a double bind and suggest that it is mirrored by childbearing, arguing that childbearing offers a particularly compelling site for thinking through the possibilities and limits of consumer politics as a response to chemical toxicity. Childbearing and toxicity both disturb conventional ideas about individual actors in such a way that it makes the necessity of collective political action apparent even to those most invested in consumer politics. By building on new materialist philosophy and reproductive justice critiques of consumer choice, I consider both social and ontological problems with a politics based on individual agents. Ultimately, I argue that despite their flaws, consumer choices can be important acts of care alongside collective political action, and that childbearing can be a catalyst for ecological approaches to politics in which relations of responsibility and care are foregrounded.

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From Mother/Fetus to Holobiont(s): A Material Feminist Ontology of the Pregnant Body

Cited by 45 publications

References 28 publications

Partial Immunities: Rethinking Communities and Belonging through Viral Memories of Influenza

Partial Immunities: Rethinking Communities and Belonging through Viral Memories of Influenza

Complete Issue

Purity is Not the Point

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