Identity in Postgenomic Times: Epigenetic Knowledge and the Pursuit of Biological Origins

Abstract

As genetic knowledge continues to strengthen notions of identity in Euro-American societies and beyond, epigenetic knowledge is intervening in these legitimation frameworks. I explore these interventions in the realm of assisted reproduction—including adoption, donor conception, and gestational surrogacy. The right to identity is protected legally in many states and receives due attention in public and private international law. Originating from the context of adoption, donor-conceived and surrogacy-born persons have recently demanded the same protections and focused on the right to genetic knowledge. This article explores possible implications of epigenetic knowledge on identity. I start by articulating the deep influence of genetics on the notion of identity, and how this unfolds in legal contexts. Next, I examine how epigenetic findings that stress the importance of seeing biological life as situated and embedded in environments can challenge how adoption, donor conception, and gestational surrogacy are experienced and understood. While I argue that epigenetic knowledge can reify identity with the same determinism underpinning genetics, it can also allow for more biosocial understandings of identity that consider history and experience as entangled with biology.

Anti-racism, racism, and the microbiome: A review

“…Whereas, I argue, the microbiomes of "traditional" Indigenous peoples in the global South are romantically deemed health-protecting precisely because of purportedly dynamic cultural traditions that act with spatiotemporal fluctuations to cultivate "harmonious" or "balanced" body-environment relations. Literature on the seasonal diets of the Hadza especially demonstrates the role of culturally dynamic fluctuations in sustaining resilient microbiomes (Rampelli et al 2015;Schnorr et al 2014;Smits et al 2017;Turroni et al 2016). Like selective uses of negative aspects of body-environment interactions, reducing biosocial differentiation to only harmonious dynamics selectively decides which aspects of socioenvironmental relations matter.…”

“…While the majority of these complex conversations on the stakes of race in the life sciences today have focused on postgenomic fields, whether as population genetics (Abu El-Haj 2007; Roberts 2011), developmental origins of health and disease, or environmental epigenetics (Keaney 2021; Mansfield and Guthman 2015; Meloni et al 2022; Wichelen 2022), this article examines the stakes of these debates on racism and anti-racism within critical scholarship on microbiome science.…”

Epigenetic citizenship and political claims-making: the ethics of molecularizing structural racism

“…This more intimate, intersubjective expression of epigenetic citizenship can range from superficial, such as a biosocial identity based on an epigenetic skin type, to the profound, as with a biosocial identity as excessively aged at a cellular level due to racial weathering (Geronimus et al 2006 ). Epigenetic selfhood attains particular salience in situations of assisted reproduction, in which individuals born through gestational surrogacy may reimagine their bio(epi)genetic kinship, race, and socioemotional histories based on the purported influence of their alternate intrauterine environments (Keaney 2021 ; van Wichelen 2022 ).…”

Six Days in Plastic: Potentiality, Normalization, and In Vitro Embryos in the Postgenomic Age

“…Yet few authors address postgenomic questions in the context of assisted reproduction. This special issue is a major contribution to that gap (Keaney 2021; van Wichelen 2022). Sonja van Wichelen (2016) argues that postgenomics challenges the primacy of biogenetics that legitimate the ART and surrogacy industry.…”