Theorising mother-baby-assemblages: The vital emergence of maternal health

Interembodiment beyond kin: Leveraging partibility within microbial FemTech

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.

Not/belonging as health promotion: The affective potentialities of human and non-human relationalities in mother-baby-assemblages

Motherhood has life-long impacts on health and exacerbates health disparities. Birthing a baby changes life immensely with heightened affectivity and emotions posing risks and opportunities. Identity-focused maternal transition theory and dominant cultural narratives of neoliberal, nuclear, and heterosexual parenting have created a narrow framework within which to understand the responsibilities and challenges of motherhood. In this we paper propose an alternative path to theorising motherhood relationally through the concept of belonging-as-affect in mother-baby-assemblages. To achieve this we plug into posthuman feminism to explore mother-baby-assemblages as relational, embodied and affective sites of fleeting and enduring not/belonging. We develop a creative qualitative reviewing approach and draw on literature that examines motherhood and mothering across place, mobilities, people, bodies and things. We explore how tracing relationalities between human and non-human actants might help us learn about 'sticky' sites of not/belonging in mother-baby-assemblages as a more fluid way of understanding the journey into and through mother/parenthood. The sticky-ness of not/belonging as timebound glue offers insights into the vital emergence of maternal health and is articulated as a mode of inquiry for future work in this space. Our orientation to posthuman mothering works through porosity, permeability and vacillation by turning our attention to sites of affectivity, and tracing non/sticky not/belonging emerging in multiple and diverse pathways, embracing openness, and eliciting generosity towards collective parenting. Understanding belonging as emergent co-becoming may allow for hopeful and inclusive motherhoods that are diversely care-ing and care-full.

Renegotiation, uncertainty, imagination: Assemblage perspectives on reproductive and family planning with an Inborn Error of immunity

Advances within the new genetics expand our understanding of the scope and presentation of inherited conditions, particularly to include incompletely penetrant and variably expressive conditions. These features can complicate patients' reproductive and family planning processes, in part because they expand the possibilities of life with an inherited condition. Despite many inquiries into reproductive planning with an inherited condition, accounts of experiential knowledge and reproductive planning fail to adequately describe the uncertainties experienced by people living with incompletely penetrant and variably expressive conditions. To address this gap, we conducted a qualitative, cross-sectional study using assemblage theory to characterize the impacts of experiential knowledge on reproductive planning for individuals living with Inborn Errors of Immunity (IEI) that exhibit incomplete penetrance and variable expressivity. Eligible participants were between ages 18 and 48, with a diagnosis of either GATA2 deficiency, PIK3CD gain-of-function disorder, or CTLA4 deficiency. Using an abductive thematic approach, attention was paid to the people, ideas, and non-human objects embedded within participants' accounts of disease experience and reproductive planning. Organized around the objects of genetic diagnosis, the body, and hypothetical children, this analysis illustrates how disease can be conceptualized as an assemblage of human and non-human objects which provoke numerous actions and affective engagements in reproductive planning. These engagements include renegotiation, uncertainty, and imagination. By emphasizing the distribution of agency and action across systems, processes, and relationships, assemblage theory invites novel ways of understanding the role of experiential knowledge on reproductive planning.