Improvising Race: Clinical Trials and Racial Classification

Valdez, Natali

doi:10.1080/01459740.2019.1642887

Cited by 20 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…Data on US food insecurity collected between 2001 and 2016, for example, found that Hispanic households suffered from endemic food insecurity of at least twice the rate of White households (Odoms-Young and Bruce 2018). Such persistent patterns of inadequate food access could replicate the conditions described in the iconic Dutch winter famine study, in part explaining the far greater prevalence of diabetes and low weight births among Black and Hispanic communities in the United States (Valdez 2019; Geronimus 1992).…”

Section: The Racializing Wombmentioning

confidence: 90%

“…Feminist scholars have also warned that casting fetal health as compounded by environments and behaviors during pregnancy can reinforce long-standing discourses of maternal blame and regimes of surveillance by positioning the pregnant woman as an “epigenetic vector” and primary site for health interventions and punitive measures (Richardson et al 2014; Richardson 2015). As Natali Valdez (2019) shows, racialized maternal hierarchies are readily folded into health interventions founded on epigenetics through practices of “improvization,” where health workers’ assumptions harden into obdurate racial categories.…”

Section: The Racializing Wombmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Racializing Womb: Surrogacy and Epigenetic Kinship

Keaney

2021

Science, Technology, & Human Values

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In gestational surrogacy arrangements, the womb is often figured as a holding environment that brings the child of commissioning parents to fruition but does not shape fetal identity. This article probes the racial imaginary of such a figuration—what I term the “nonracializing womb”—where gestation is seen as peripheral to racial transmission. Drawing on feminist science studies frameworks and data from interviews with parents who commissioned surrogates, this article traces the cultural politics of the nonracializing womb, positioning it as an index for broader understandings of race, reproductive labor, and kinship that hinge on nuclear and biogenetic forms. It then problematizes this figure of gestation by engaging emerging research on environmental epigenetics, which offers a lively model of pregnancy as shaping fetal biology, blurring the lines between surrogate and fetus. I argue that epigenetics offers a resource to reimagine gestation as a racializing process, by theorizing race not as solely genetic, but as relational, socio-environmental, and forged through distributed kinship lineages.

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Section: The Racializing Wombmentioning

confidence: 90%

Section: The Racializing Wombmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Racializing Womb: Surrogacy and Epigenetic Kinship

Keaney

2021

Science, Technology, & Human Values

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“…F. S. Roberts 2017). It is in this sociopolitical context that epigenetic research on the effects of early life stress, trauma, and adversity is both necessary and problematic as it can provide critical evidence of the need for social support and structural change, and is also weaponized and racialized against the very people most affected by these forces (Mansfield 2012;Valdez 2019).…”

Section: Conclusion: Structural Harm Lived Experiences and Reimaginin...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The studies we followed were produced and disseminated within the United States and Canada, where pregnant people's rights and well‐being are often actively undermined and the burdens of child wellbeing individualized and gendered, especially for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (Benjamin 2018; Dow and Lamoreaux 2020; D. Roberts 1997; E. F. S. Roberts 2017). It is in this sociopolitical context that epigenetic research on the effects of early life stress, trauma, and adversity is both necessary and problematic as it can provide critical evidence of the need for social support and structural change, and is also weaponized and racialized against the very people most affected by these forces (Mansfield 2012; Valdez 2019).…”

Section: Conclusion: Structural Harm Lived Experiences and Reimaginin...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Alongside these frameworks, others critically examine the practices and consequences of epigenetics, particularly when it comes to the intergenerational effects of early life experiences (Champagne 2010;Mulligan 2016;Sullivan 2013;Warin et al 2020). These scholars point out how periods of the life course are ascribed different importance within epigenetic studies (Lappé and Landecker 2015), describe conceptual and material instantiations of "the environment" (Agard-Jones 2013; Murphy 2011Murphy , 2017, and chart their racialized and gendered dimensions (Chiapperino and Panese 2018;Gkiouleka et al 2018;Pentecost and Ross 2019;Valdez 2019;Valdez and Deomampo 2019). This work suggests that the discourse of stress, trauma, and adversity appears widely in environmental epigenetic research but, as others in this special issue observe, often serves as a limited placeholder for the social and political contexts that shape lived experiences.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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You Are What Your Mother Endured: Intergenerational Epigenetics, Early Caregiving, and the Temporal Embedding of Adversity

Lappé

2021

Med Anthropol Q

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Environmental epigenetics has become a site of growing attention related to the intergenerational effects of stress, trauma, and adversity. This article draws on a multi-sited ethnography of epigenetic knowledge production in the United States and Canada to document how scientists conceptualize, model, and measure these experiences and their effects on children's neurodevelopmental and behavioral health. We find that scientists' efforts to identify the molecular effects of stress, trauma, and adversity results in a temporal focus on the mother-child dyad during early life. This has the effect of biologizing early childhood adversity, positioning it as a consequence of caregiving, and producing epigenetic findings that often align with individually oriented interventions rather than social and structural change. Our analysis suggests that epigenetic models of stress, trauma, and adversity therefore situate histories of oppression, inequality, and subjugation in discrete and gendered family relations, resulting in the temporal embedding of adversity during early life.[epigenetics, adversity, temporality, intergenerational, maternal care] Biologizing AdversityA growing body of social, biomedical, and epidemiological research demonstrates that inequalities resulting from systemic forms of oppression and inadequate infrastructures of care can become biologically embedded (see Landecker 2016; Wahlberg 2018), a phenomenon that epidemiologist Nancy Krieger refers to as "embodied harm" (Krieger 2005(Krieger , 2020. In the United States and Canada, the rise of environmental epigenetic research on stress, trauma, and adversity corresponds to broader concerns about environmental harm and growing urgency about the long-term, embodied impacts of early life experiences (Lamoreaux 2016;Müller et al. 2017).

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Devices: A location for feminist analytics and praxis

Ballestero¹,

Oyarzun²

2022

Feminist Anthropology

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This article offers the device as a methodological tool and concrete space for feminist praxis that can challenge the order of a world that is patriarchal, racist, and organized around capital extraction. Material or immaterial in form, a device is a tool through which different actors ground, produce, and concretize technological, legal, scientific, and political work. Many objects can become devices when pragmatically activated toward a particular effect; the challenge is to grasp them as such in the field and assess them for their political power and potential to bring forth possible worlds. Through examples from anthropology and adjacent literatures, we show how people accomplish three kinds of political work through their devices. Devices are sometimes used to solidify a domain of social life, such as the economy, the population, or race. Devices can constellate and produce a patterned effect, such as anti‐Blackness. Moreover, devices can be used to clear space for new and maybe unexpected possibilities. We end by articulating how the device, by way of its artificiality, offers potential pathways for furthering ethnographic and analytic practices and performing feminist political work.

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Improvising Race: Clinical Trials and Racial Classification

Cited by 20 publications

References 23 publications

The Racializing Womb: Surrogacy and Epigenetic Kinship

The Racializing Womb: Surrogacy and Epigenetic Kinship

You Are What Your Mother Endured: Intergenerational Epigenetics, Early Caregiving, and the Temporal Embedding of Adversity

Devices: A location for feminist analytics and praxis

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