Short abstract:

This paper uses feminist philosophy to reframe approaches to encountering micro-organisms away expectations of control toward playful openness and the ability to resist epistemic closure, in terms of our encounters with micro-organisms themselves and judgments about what kinds of encounters count.

Long abstract:

This paper uses feminist philosophy to reframe approaches to encountering micro-organisms away expectations of control toward playful openness and the ability to resist epistemic closure. María Lugones’s discussion of “loving playfulness” and Dawn Rae Davis’s discussion of love as “the ability of not knowing” (a form of “loving ignorance”) both suggest modes of encounter in which imperatives of mastery and domination are suspended. Both of these discussions are situated as challenges to Western colonial projects. As Lugones argues, the insistence on a strict ontology of “atomic, homogeneous, separable categories” comes from a European modernity, and used as a “normative tool” in colonizing projects (Lugones 2010, 743). While developed in relation to human contexts, their work can help cultivate an open-minded ability to pay attention to what is actually there while resisting the imposition of our pre-determined and “arrogant” frameworks on microbiomes. Perhaps we can think of encountering microbiomes in Lugones’s mode of playfully travelling to a different “world,” without having to settle on one single meaning or model. This is not merely scientific pluralism, which allows different models to coexist; this is resisting the certainty that any of our models might have, and keeping open our ability to be surprised. This project concerns both our encounters with micro-organisms themselves, as well as judgements about what kinds of encounters count. This openness helps resist ableist and healthist practices of construing microbes as tools for achieving “normality” while also opening up spaces for recognizing different kinds of knowledge.