Maroney, Stephanie Ruth (Author)
Biltekoff, Charlotte (Advisor)
This dissertation examines the promises and perils of how the emergent science of the human microbiome is being taken up in the realm of diet and health. I demonstrate that the science of the human microbiome marks a broad scientific and cultural shift to thinking of microbes as beneficial lifeforms in dynamic ecological relations with human beings, and in so doing, it opens up new possibilities for conceptualizing human embodiment and ecological relations between humans and microbes. However, I argue that these possibilities also bring new interventions and potentially perilous forms of governance over human and more-than-human life. Through a discursive analysis of microbiome dietary advice, ancestral microbiome research, and food fermentation practices, I argue that new ways of living and eating in the probiotic present are shaped by ideologies about health, promissory scientific futures, and ethical ways of living. Within the dietary advice, the possibilities of the human microbiome are put in service of intensifying the logics of healthism, particularly the tropes of self-control, individualism, and responsibility. Within ancestral microbiome research, I argue that the possibilities of the human microbiome are put in service of the ongoing colonial dynamics of Western technoscience as it seeks to secure probiotic futures for Westerners at the expense of Indigenous people. And in my analysis of the queer fermentive praxis of Sandor Katz, I argue that the possibilities of the human microbiome are put in service of maintaining non-dogmatic, queer relations between humans and more-than-human world.
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Thesis
Kym Weed;
(2018)
Our Microbes: Imagining Human Interdependence with Bacteria in American Literature, Science, and Culture, 1880-1920
(/isis/citation/CBB507631304/)
Thesis
Garth Jerome Sabo;
(2019)
Gut Feelings: Human Waste and Signs of Health in 20th- and 21st-century Literature
(/isis/citation/CBB295837344/)
Article
Nicole Welk-Joerger;
(2022)
The Business with “Bugs”: Ruminology and the Commercial Feed Industry in the United States
(/isis/citation/CBB620126843/)
Article
Bradford Bouley;
(2020)
Digesting Faith: Eating God, Man, and Meat in Seventeenth-Century Rome
(/isis/citation/CBB553359250/)
Article
Miguel Escribano-Cabeza;
(2020)
Fish and Fishpond. an Ecological Reading of G.W. Leibniz’s Monadology §§ 63–70
(/isis/citation/CBB397286416/)
Article
Pierre-Olivier Méthot;
(2016)
La médecine (évolutive) entre individu et population : l’apport de la microbiologie au problème de l’individualité biologique
(/isis/citation/CBB976405663/)
Article
James Stark;
(2023)
Making Microbes: Theorizing the Invisible in Historical Scholarship
(/isis/citation/CBB108538466/)
Article
Lucinda Cole;
(2017)
Gut Ecology: Meat Science, Modernity, and Carrion Aversion in Gandhi's India
(/isis/citation/CBB512861716/)
Chapter
Williams, Elizabeth A.;
(2012)
Food and Feeling: “Digestive Force” and the Nature of Morbidity in Vitalist Medicine
(/isis/citation/CBB001200746/)
Book
Bathsheba Demuth;
(2019)
Floating coast: An environmental history of the Bering Strait
(/isis/citation/CBB610557368/)
Article
E Allen Driggers;
(2021)
‘The voice of the stomach’: the mind, hypochondriasis and theories of dyspepsia in the nineteenth century
(/isis/citation/CBB900221583/)
Book
Brian King;
(2017)
States of Disease: Political Environments and Human Health
(/isis/citation/CBB450453543/)
Article
Hub Zwart;
(2022)
“Love is a microbe too”: Microbiome dialectics
(/isis/citation/CBB625800686/)
Article
Caroline Durand;
(2016)
Patates, pain, et lard salé valaient-ils mieux que céréales, bacon et boeuf haché? La diète quotidienne et la santé au Québec, 1861–1941
(/isis/citation/CBB133892591/)
Book
Adrienne Rose Bitar;
(2018)
Diet and the Disease of Civilization
(/isis/citation/CBB944318327/)
Article
Rudy, Kathy;
(2012)
Locavores, Feminism, and the Question of Meat
(/isis/citation/CBB001202115/)
Book
Galen, ;
Grant, Mark;
(2000)
Galen on Food and Diet
(/isis/citation/CBB000102162/)
Chapter
Gilman, Sander L.;
(2013)
Epidemics of Famine and Obesity: China as the Modern World
(/isis/citation/CBB001214660/)
Article
Brian Payne;
(2019)
Nature's Bread: The Natural Food Debate in Canada, 1940–1949
(/isis/citation/CBB006947860/)
Article
Santiago Giménez-Roldán;
John C. Steele;
Valerie S. Palmer;
Peter S. Spencer;
(2021)
Lytico-bodig in Guam: Historical links between diet and illness during and after Spanish colonization
(/isis/citation/CBB192108616/)
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