Book Review | Gut Anthro: An Experiment in Thinking with Microbes, by Amber Benezra (University of Minnesota Press, 2023)

• Published in: Catalyst : Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Theory, Technoscience, 2024, Vol.10 (1)
• Main Author: Gitzen, Timothy
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: Anthropology; Collaboration; Cultural anthropology; Ethnography; Feminism; Kinship; Malnutrition; Science; Scientists
• ISSN: 2380-3312
• DOI: 10.28968/cftt.v10i2.41548

[...]while including a history of the microbiome and how it comes into existence through scientific practice and knowledge, she laments that the chapter “references mostly white, able-bodied, hetero-cis-male authors as they tyrannize the fields of microbiology and STS” (89). If feminist science studies and feminist epistemologies frame the methods of this book, this chapter provides a feminist anthropological analysis of the structural and infrastructural violences experienced by the Bangladeshi women in the study. [...]nuances and contexts are often left out in the datafication of microbes, but Benezra’s point is that microbes must not be decontextualized from the “political, economic, and political history of undernutrition” (165). [...]far, Benezra has mobilized both feminist and Indigenous scholarship and methodologies to interrogate the microbe, and in Chapter five she queries the racialization of microbes in scientific literature and practice. Gut Anthro is an ambitious and promising book, its strength lying in both its optimism for a different form of collaboration—one where anthropology and microbiome research can truly influence one another—and in its call for mobilizing feminist, decolonial, and Indigenous scholarship and knowledge for understanding the microbe differently. [...]Benezra boldly states that microbes “always come into being” through sight, perhaps indexing Donna Haraway’s attention to sight in “Situated Knowledges.”