Epigenetic life: biological plasticity, abnormality, and new configurations of race and reproduction

Abstract

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 ‘uterine environment’ is figured as the key space–time of epigenetic becoming. We argue that in this focus on abnormality and improvement, epigenetics is tied to a eugenic logic, even as it rejects notions of genetic determinism. While it might seem that epigenetic models of plastic life should eliminate race by eliminating notions of discrete kinds given in nature, it appears that epigenetics offers a new form of racialization based on reproductive processes of becoming rather than on pre-given nature.