Authors
Becky Mansfield, Julie Guthman
Publication date
2015/1
Journal
cultural geographies
Volume
22
Issue
1
Pages
3-20
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Description
Environmental epigenetics is a ‘hot’ new field of post-genomic science investigating mechanisms that influence how genes are expressed. It offers a dynamic and non-dualistic understanding of the relationship between environments, genes, bodies, and health. We ask how this new science of biological plasticity is changing existing concepts of normality and abnormality. We find that epigenetics is contributing to a new biological (yet non-determinist) ontology of race and that the fetus and reproductive women are emerging as the central figures in this new epigenetic model of race and bodily plasticity. We find that epigenetics is a science of variation in which biological difference is figured as both normal (inevitable) and abnormal (a sign of disruption); it then seeks to improve life by identifying therapies to cure epigenetic ‘abnormalities’. In this way, epigenetics emerges as a reproductive science, in which the …
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