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

Abstract

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).

The Temporal Politics of Placenta Epigenetics: Bodies, Environments and Time

“…The first is the focus on pregnancy as a ‘critical window’, and the second is how epigenetic modifications can occur because of the unique plasticity of developing systems during this time. These two logics are foundational to how ‘developmental time’ emerged in researchers’ accounts and suggest how questions of epigenetic plasticity and stability remain tethered to early life (see Lappé and Jeffries Hein, 2022).…”

“…These dimensions point to the significance of critical windows of development (developmental time), the potential persistence of epigenetic changes leading to later disease (epigenetic time) and the embodied impacts of social history (generational time). They also create the conditions for understanding embodiment as recursive, because the body and its relationships to various environments are continually imagined in relation to what occurred in utero (see Lappé and Jeffries Hein, 2022). In this way, the material instantiations of environments loop back on themselves (Franklin, 2013; Hacking, 1995), informing their embodied effects.…”

Biocircularities: New Formations of Embodied Time

“…In Warin, Kearney, Kowal and Byrne's paper, collisions between Euro-centric biosciences and Indigenous science produce surprising affinities and show up weaknesses and limitations in technoscientific temporality . Deploying Indigenous logics, allied with theories of slow violence and accounts of historical trauma, allows Indigenous activists to challenge what Lappé and Jeffries Hein have in a recent paper described as the 'temporal embedding of adversity': the location of adversity in pregnancy and early childhood with a number of individualising and biologising effects (Lappé and Jeffries Hein, 2021). As we considered in the introduction to this essay, the circular is a surprising form through which to imagine breaking out of the rigid cage of health 'determinants', the 'small cause' and a politics of health that widens the range of responsibilities that individuals shoulder for the maintenance of their bodies.…”

The Reproduction of Shame: Pregnancy, Nutrition and Body Weight in the Translation of Developmental Origins of Adult Disease

“…In drawing attention to DOHaD evidence about the role of maternal care, we are mindful of the work of other science and technology studies (STS) scholars pointing out the over-simplified analogies made between rats in laboratories and human mothers, where “licking and grooming of pups by their mother comes to stand in for the value-laden category of ‘maternal care’” (Kenney and Muller 2017, 29; Lappe and Hein 2021; Richardson 2021). In these laboratory experiments, the broader environment is erased: there is only the mother, whose role is necessarily enlarged and all-powerful.…”