Der epigenetische Körper. Zwischen biosozialer Komplexität und Umweltdeterminismus.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17169/ogj.2017.17Keywords:
Body, Biology, Epigenetics, Gender, ClassAbstract
Environmental epigenetics explores how environmental factors can affect gene expression and thus body, health and illness. This includes studies of the effects of material factors, such as toxins or nutrition, but also of how social experiences shape gene expression. Environmental epigenetics thus conceptualizes the body as ‚biosocial‘ and opens up opportunities for better understanding how different environmental conditions affect human biology. Drawing on experiments that explore the epigenetic effects of ‚maternal care‘ this article investigates both the potentials and the challenges of such epigenetic perspectives on the body. Particularly, the article shows how despite a softening of the traditional boundaries between the social and the biological in epigenetic research, categories of social difference, such as gender and class, are often framed in rather static and deterministic ways.References
Cameron, Nicole; Shahrokh, Dara; Del Corpo, Adina; Dhir, Susanta K.; Szyf, Moshe; Champagne, Frances A.; Meaney, Michael J. (2008): Epigenetic Programming of Phenotypic Variations in Reproductive Strategies in the Rat through Maternal Care. In: Journal of Neuroendocrinology 20(6), 795-801.
Champagne, Frances A.; Mashoodh, Rahia (2009): Genes in Context: Gene-Environment Interplay and the Origins of Individual Differences in Behavior. In: Current Directions in Psychological Science 18(3), 127-131.
Champagne, Frances A.; Meaney, Michael J. (2006): Stress During Gestation Alters Postpartum Maternal Care and the Development of the Offspring in a Rodent Model. In: Biological Psychiatry 59(12), 1227-1235.
Clarke, Adele E.; Shim, Janet K.; Mamo, Laura; Fosket, Jennifer R.; Fishman, Jennifer R. (2003): Biomedicalization: Technoscientific Transformations of Health, Illness, and U.S. Biomedicine. In: American Sociological Review 68(2), 161-194.
Fausto-Sterling, Anne (2000): Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books.
Feil, Robert; Fraga, Mario F. (2011): Epigenetics and the Environment: Emerging Patterns and Implications. In: Nature Reviews Genetics 13(2), 97-109.
Fine, Cordelia (2010): Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Hanson, Mark; Müller, Ruth (2017): Epigenetic Inheritance and the Responsibility for Health in Society. In: The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology 5(1), 11-12.
Hanson, Mark; Skinner, Michael K. (2016): Developmental Origins of Epigenetic Transgenerational Inheritance. Environmental Epigenetics 2(1), 1-9. doi:10.1093/eep/dvw002.
Haraway, Donna J. (1989): Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge.
Haraway, Donna J. (1997): Modest₋Witness@Second₋Millennium. FemaleMan₋Meets₋Oncomouse: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge.
Harding, Sandra (1986): The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Heard, Edith; Martienssen, Robert A. (2014): Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: Myths and Mechanisms. In: Cell 157(1), 95-109.
Heijmans, Bastiaan T.; Tobi, Elmar W.; Stein, Aryeh D.; Putter, Hein; Blauw, Gerard J.; Susser, Ezra S.; Slagboom, P. Eline; Lumey, L. H. (2008): Persistent Epigenetic DifferencesAssociated with Prenatal Exposure to Famine in Humans. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 105(44), 17046 17049.
Hubbard, Ruth (1979): Have Only Men Evolved? In: Fried, Barbara; Hubbard, Ruth; Henifin, Mary Sue (Hg.): Women Look at Biology Looking at Women. Cambridge: Schenkman Publishing Co.
Jirtle, Randy L.; Skinner, Michael K. (2007): Environmental Epigenomics and Disease Susceptibility. In: Nature Reviews. Genetics 8(4), 253-262.
Keller, Evelyn F. (2015): The Postgenomics Genome. In: Richardson, Sarah S.; Stevens, Hallam (Hg.): Postgenomics: Perspectives on Biology after the Genome. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 9-31.
Keller, Evelyn F. (1995): Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth Century Biology. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kenney, Martha; Müller, Ruth (2017): Of Rats and Women: Narratives of Motherhood in Environmental Epigenetics. In: BioSocieties 12(1), 32-46.
Krall, Lisa; Schmitz, Sigrid (2106): Potenziale epigenetischer Forschung für das Konzept ‚sex vs. gender‘. In: Gender 8(2), 99-116.
Kristof, Nicholas (2012): Cuddle Your Kid! New York Times. New York.
Landecker, Hannah (2011): Food as Exposure: Nutritional Epigenetics and the New Metabolism. In: BioSocieties 6(2), 167-194.
Lappé, Martine; Landecker, Hannah (2015): How the Genome Got a Life Span. In: New Genetics and Society 34(2), 152 176.
Loi, Michele; Del Savio, Lorenzo; Stupka, Elia (2013): Social Epigenetics and Equality of Opportunity. In: Public Health Ethics 6(2), 142-153.
Lux, Vanessa; Richter, Jörg Thoms (Hg.) (2014): Kulturen der Epigenetik: Vererbt, codiert, übertragen. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Marmot, Michael (2015): The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World. In: The Lancet 386(10011), 2442-2444.
McGowan, Patrick O.; Szyf, Moshe (2010): The Epigenetics of Social Adversity in Early Life: Implications for Mental Health Outcomes. In: Neurobiology of Disease 39(1), 66-72.
Meaney, Michael J. (2001): Maternal Care, Gene Expression, and the Transmission of Individual Differences in Stress Reactivity Across Generations. In: Annual Review of Neuroscience 24(1), 1161-1192.
Meloni, Maurizio (2015): Heredity 2.0: The Epigenetics Effect. In: New Genetics and Society 34(2), 117-124.
Miller, Greg (2010): The Seductive Allure of Behavioral Epigenetics. In: Science 329(5987), 24-27.
Müller, Ruth (in Arbeit): Biological Determinism in the Age of Epigenetics: From Genetic to Environmental.
Müller, Ruth; Samaras, Georgia (im Erscheinen). Epigenetics and aging research. Between adult malleability and early life programming. Manuskript unter Begutachtung durch das Journal BioSocieties.
Niewöhner, Jörg (2011): Epigenetics: Embedded Bodies and the Molecularisation of Biography and Milieu. In: BioSocieties 6(3), 279-298.
Oudshoorn, Nelly (2000): The Birth of Sex Hormones. In: Londa Schiebinger (Hg.): Feminism and the Body. New York: Oxford University Press, 87-117.
Pickersgill, Martyn; Niewohner, Jörg; Müller, Ruth; Martin, Paul; Cunningham-Burley, Sarah (2013): Mapping the New Molecular Landscape: Social Dimensions of Epigenetics. In: New Genetics and Society 32(4), 429-447.
Richardson, Sarah S. (2017): Plasticity and Programming: Feminism and the Epigenetic Imaginary. In: Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 43(1), 29-52.
Rose, Steven (2009): Should Scientists Study Race and IQ? In: Nature 457(7231), 786-788.
Richardson, Sarah S. (2015): Maternal Bodies in the Postgenomic Order: Gender and the Explanatory Landscape of Epigenetics. In: Richardson, Sarah S.; Stevens , Hallam (Hg.): Postgenomics: Perspectives on Biology After the Genome. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 210-231.
Roughgarden, Joan (2009): The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness. Berkeley: The University of California Press.
Roughgarden, Joan (2004): Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Schiebinger, Londa (1993): Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science. Boston: Beacon Press.
Singh, Ilina (2012): Human Development, Nature and Nurture: Working Beyond the Divide. In: BioSocieties 7(3), 308-321.
Skinner, Michael K. (2015): Environmental Epigenetics. In: Environmental Epigenetics 1(1), 1-3.
Szyf, Moshe (2009): The Epigenetic Impact of Early Life Adversity. In: Sassone-Corsi, Paolo (Hg.): Epigenetic Control and Neuronal Function. Washington, DC: Society for Neuroscience, 28-34. Umweltbundesamt (2015): Epigenetik: Umwelt und Genom – ein Zusammenspiel mit Folgen. http://www.umweltbundesamt.de/themen/gesundheit/belastung-des-menschen-ermitteln/epigenetik (28.8.2017).
Waddington, Conrad Hal (1942): Canalization of Development and Inheritance of Acquired Characters. In: Nature 150, 563-565.
Waggoner, Miranda R. (2015): Cultivating the Maternal Future: Public Health and the Prepregnant Self. In: Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 40(4), 939-962.
Weaver, Ian C. G.; Cervoni, Nadia; Champagne, Frances A.; D'Alessio, Ana C.; Sharma, Shakti; Seckl, Jonathan R.; Dymov, Sergiy; Szyf, Moshe; Meaney; Michael J. (2004): Epigenetic Programming by Maternal Behavior. In: Nature Neuroscience 7(8), 847- 854.
Wells, Jonathan C. (2010): Maternal Capital and the Metabolic Ghetto: An Evolutionary Perspective on the Transgenerational Basis of Health Inequalities. In: American Journal of Human Biology 22(1), 1-17.
Yehuda, Rachel; Daskalakis, Nikolaos P.; Bierer, Linda M.; Bader, Heather N.; Klengel, Torsten; Holsboer, Florian; Binder, Elisabeth B. (2015): Holocaust Exposure Induced Intergenerational Effects on FKBP5 Methylation. In: Biological Psychiatry 80(5), 372- 380.
Zhang, Tie-Yuan; Parent, Carine; Weaver, Ian C. G.; Meaney, Michael J. (2004): Maternal Programming of Individual Differences in Defensive Responses in the Rat. In: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1032(1), 85-103.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
All contributions in Open Gender Journal are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. You may freely make use of the corresponding texts in accordance to the conditions of the license (License contract, generally understandable version). There is no exclusive transfer of usage rights ("copyright transfer"). Open Gender Journal does not charge authors any costs for publication (so-called Article Processing Charges, APC) or submission (so-called Submission Charges). Authors are encouraged to share their contributions in other places, such as repositories.
