Dismantling the Self/Other Dichotomy in Science: Towards a Feminist Model of the Immune System

Weasel, Lisa H.

doi:10.1353/hyp.2001.0015

Cited by 7 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…I want to assess the fetal-maternal relationship in terms of intraaction by looking more closely at this immunological 'control'. To understand how scientists see the placenta as immunological, as well as why this is important for thinking critically about reproductive politics, it is first necessary to detour into the history of immunology, which shows a surprising confluence of politics with biology (see Cohen, 2009;Esposito, 2011;Haraway, 1991;Howes, 2007;A Martin, 2010;E Martin, 1990;Weasel, 2001). Originally a legal term referring to 'privileges and entitlements conferred on individuals or collectivities that exempt them from political obligations and responsibilities' (Cohen, 2009: 40), immunity prescribed conditions under which an individual could stand apart from a community founded on obligations of universal citizenship.…”

Section: Theories Of Placental Immunity: Difference Tolerancementioning

confidence: 99%

Fetal–Maternal Intra-action

Yoshizawa

2016

Body & Society

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Extensively employed in reproductive science, the term fetal–maternal interface describes how maternal and fetal tissues interact in the womb to produce the transient placenta, purporting a theory of pregnancy where ‘mother’, ‘fetus’, and ‘placenta’ are already-separate entities. However, considerable scientific evidence supports a different theory, which is also elaborated in feminist and new materialist literatures. Informed by interviews with placenta scientists as well as secondary sources on placental immunology and the developmental origins of health and disease, I explore evidence not of interfacing during pregnancy, but of intra-action, or the mutual emergence of entities in simultaneous practices of differentiation and connection. I argue that attending to evidence that can be figured as intra-action enables us to recognize, account for, and attend to diffuse responsibilities for fetal–maternal outcomes that extend beyond mothers to the biosocial milieus of pregnancy. In reimaging the intra-action of placentas, a new understanding of what constitutes a ‘healthy pregnancy’ becomes possible.

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Section: Theories Of Placental Immunity: Difference Tolerancementioning

confidence: 99%

Fetal–Maternal Intra-action

Yoshizawa

2016

Body & Society

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“…A number of philosophers and sociologists of science have taken up the empirical challenges to the S/NS model posed by some biological phenomena. Their analyses show how both the foundations of this model and its limitations are interwoven with philosophical and phenomenological notions of the bounded self on which the metaphor is founded (Hird, 2007;Howes, 2008;Pradeu and Carosella, 2006;Tauber, 1994Tauber, , 2006Weasel, 2001). Microchimerism is one event inadequately predicted or explained by the S/NS rule that 'every foreign entity will trigger an immune reaction' (Pradeu and Carosella, 2006), but it is by no means alone.…”

Section: The Defended Self Imperilledmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As Donna Haraway (1991a) and Emily Martin (1990Martin ( , 1994 have shown, the conception of the body as defended nation-state in constant conflict with threatening intruders dominates immunology discourse in theory, practice, pedagogy and popular imagination. Immunology came into its own in the immediate post-Second World War social climate and it renders the body in terms of particular national and social arrangements, at the same time justifying those arrangements, by reading them from the 'natural' body (Weasel, 2001). This picture of the body requires that: 'the boundary between the body (self) and the external world (nonself) is rigid and absolute' (E. Martin, 1990: 411).…”

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confidence: 99%

Microchimerism in the Mother(land): Blurring the Borders of Body and Nation

Martin

2010

Body & Society

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This article traces the ubiquitous geopolitical metaphors used by researchers in the field of pregnancy-related microchimerism. In this research domain, immunologists and medical geneticists locate ‘non-self’ cells in women by marking Y chromosomes in cells derived from their sons. In the course of this research trajectory, experiments have yielded a number of surprises, beginning with the very presence of these cells in women decades after pregnancy. This finding confounded the expectations predicted by classical immunology, which posits the destruction of such ‘foreign’ entities. Once they were known to be present, fetal cells were implicated in pathological and destructive activity. In a series of reorientations in which metaphor, theory and practice are entangled with matter, the characterization of these cells has shifted from invaders to insurgent foreigners to assimilated productive immigrants. The article reflects on this rich domain of material-semiotic practice to demonstrate that the case of fetomaternal cell trafficking contributes to a growing uneasiness with dominant ontologies of bodies as bounded, defended, pure collectives of homogeneous inhabitants.

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“…This characteristic language of biomedical knowledge has been widely explored by many feminist scholars such as Donna Haraway (1989, 15), for whom such notions of a threatened self indicate that 'individuality is a strategic defense problem' in order to expose what is at stake in maintaining boundaries between the supposedly normal self and the pathological other. Emily Martin (1990), Lisa Weasel (2001) and more recently Susan Kelly (2012) have all commented on the emergence of the specific discourse of immunology, while Polly Matzinger (2001) 9 has, like Haraway, offered an alternative model. Nonetheless, although the familiar image of confrontation has been progressively undermined by research findings that do not fit the embattled self-defence model, the very same metaphors still dominate popular discourse.…”

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confidence: 99%

(Micro)chimerism, Immunity and Temporality: Rethinking the Ecology of Life and Death

Shildrick

2019

Australian Feminist Studies

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The recent upsurge of interest in the co-articulation of biopolitical and bioethical entanglements underpin both a concern for the putatively temporal thresholds of human life and the very conception of a bounded humanity itself. Taking a step further, I want to suggest that micro(chimerism) as a very specific form of somatic multiplicity, read together with the contemporary rethinking of the concept of immunity, instantiates a fundamental disordering of linear temporality. And that in turn calls for a further reconceptualisation of conventional bioethics. I acknowledge the force of an existing postmodernist bioethics that has attended to the materiality and viscerality of the body and challenged the meaning of human being but, until recently, it has not addressed the bookends of life and death. Once the teleology of the life course is contested, however, death is no longer an insult to being, but merely one event constituting an ongoing vitalism. I propose an atemporal bioethics of coexistence rather than one of successive existence that is faced always with its own finitude.

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Dismantling the Self/Other Dichotomy in Science: Towards a Feminist Model of the Immune System

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

Fetal–Maternal Intra-action

Fetal–Maternal Intra-action

Microchimerism in the Mother(land): Blurring the Borders of Body and Nation

(Micro)chimerism, Immunity and Temporality: Rethinking the Ecology of Life and Death

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