This article examines how amplified fetal heartbeats may be used to make claims about fetuses' social presence. These claims are supported by the Mexican Public Health system's selection of the maternal-child relationship as a key site of clinical intervention, intertwining medical and moral discourses. Drawing on the robust literature on cross-cultural propositions of "fetal personhood," this analysis uses ethnographic material from public health institutions in Oaxaca, Mexico, to explore how doctors use diagnostic technology to materialize fetuses for their patients. I argue that Spanish's epistemological distinction between saber (to have knowledge about) and conocer (to be acquainted with) is key to how diagnostic technologies may be deployed to make social claims. I use one doctor's attempts to use technology to shift her patient from saber to conocer as illustrative of underlying cultural logics about fetal embodiment and its proof. Focused on the under-theorized socio-medical deployment of audio fetal heartbeat technology, this article suggests that sound-in addition to sight-is a potent tool for constructing fetal personhood.

Fermentation is the product of microbial relations that mediate, or foment, relationships between bodies and food products. Using cases of food fermentation made with microbes from ruminants’ stomachs and women’s vaginas, we denaturalize the idea of bodies’ mammalian capacity as linked to particular food relations and explore the traction of gendered ideologies that order exchanges between microbial life to result in such food. This essay first outlines our core argument by situating fermentation within the emergent science on bodily microbial relations, or microbiomes. Incorporating science and technology studies literature together with the feminist literature, we note that the association with lactating, first, aligns one gender more closely with nature and, thus, the other with culture while also leading to the conflation of the feminine with the mammalian. Additionally, this structural alignment with species’ nature ignores that making food from bodies requires culture—both in the sense of culturing microbes and in being reliant on technoscientific processes. We then present two seemingly binary case studies, which are together analyzed through their ability to enroll gender and/or disavow gender in order to produce legitimate food products. We conclude by showing how attention to the ordering and disordering work of microbial relations in the fermentation process both opens up new possibilities for recognizing the way that sex and gender materialize in the capacity of mammalian bodies to ferment and emphasizes that fermentation is always entangled with multiple layers of reproductive labor. Ultimately, such analysis extends food studies scholarship about fermentation into the microbial materiality of gender and food.

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Maternal mortality is simultaneously a global epidemiological phenomenon and an individually contextualized tragedy. This article analyzes how films promoting the Millennium Development Goals’ campaign to reduce maternal mortality rely on particular visual and narrative tropes to align the affective tug of a single case and the global import of an aggregated statistic. Their reliance on particular stories to embody figures of global development constitutes an affective pedagogy that raises familiar questions for anthropologists: how to represent global suffering, who represents global suffering, and at whom such representations are aimed. I argue that reliance on the weight of visually absent, yet symbolically present, dead maternal bodies directs the films’ representational strategies about structural violence toward a reinforcement of a long‐standing narrative and image of witnessing from a distance.

This study is a systematic review of cultural narratives that drive American belief in the value and efficacy of stocking up on fish antibiotics for human consumption. Popularized by “doomsday prepper” forums and survivalist medical professionals' online videos, this narrative suggests that in some scenarios humans may benefit from such treatments—even as they note its contraindication to mainstream public health advice. Discussions in crowd-sourcing forums however, reveal that in practice Americans are using them as a form of home remedy to treat routine infections without missing work or to make up for gaps in insurance coverage. This article argues for greater attention to what makes it plausible and reasonable to treat human conditions with animal medications. It suggests that public health initiatives should address such decisions as emerging from a rational analysis of social and economic conditions rather than dismissing such practices as dangerous to population and individual health outcomes. As social scientists of medicine have long argued, collective narratives about health and medicine illustrate deeply the broader contexts in which communities understand and experience bodily state and shape how communities interact with public health institutions and respond to medical expertise. This study surveys online discussions about “fish mox” to show how participants contest medical expertise and promote a more distributed form of populist expertise. As such, consuming fish mox is both panacea for health inequality and a critique of health institutions for perpetrating such stratification.