Interembodiment beyond kin: Leveraging partibility within microbial FemTech

Rebecca Howes-Mischel and Megan Tracy

Social Science & Medicine, 2025, vol. 376, issue C

Abstract: Contextualized within paradigm shifts in biological sciences toward reimagining reproductive health as entangled with microbial bodies, we engage interembodiment to underscore central tensions within projects leveraging the promises of the gendered microbiome. With research demonstrating that maternal vaginal microbes first “seed” infants' immuno-development and then dynamic relations at the breast develop it, microbes and their relations become reframed as a kind of intergenerational biocultural “inheritance.” This inheritance is experienced through microbiopolitical demands for a “good vagina” or the incitement to breastfeed—what we term a chimeric imperative—but is also framed as potentially severable, replicable, and redistributable. Returning to Strathern's theorizing about how the body's porosity facilitates such partible detachments and reattachments, we analyze four companies' projects that exploit microbes' dynamic potential to address persistent gendered health gaps. We argue that newly relational ideas about embodiment reconceptualize the biopolitical demands of and on the reproductive body, guide how venture-tech companies seek to address persistent technical and ethical challenges, and reconceptualize how people form biosocial connections across bodies. Taking microbes' partible nature seriously highlights these intergenerational transfers as ongoing and full of possibility for a range of people; enabling not only expected attachments, but also other shared embodiments potentially distributed beyond the skin.

Keywords: Gendered microbiome; Reproduction; FemTech; Interembodiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2025.117742

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