Paper short abstract:

This paper takes a critical lens to the concept of 'the environment' and its differing spatio-temporal scales in postgenomic landscapes of developmental origins of health and disease and fetal microchimerism.

Paper long abstract:

The environment is an oft-cited term in the new post-genomic models of life, ranging from references to environmental epigenetics (exposures, feasts and famine) in diverse geographical locations and historical times, microbiomal habitats, intrauterine environments and maternal and molecular landscapes. From its inception in the 1940s epigenetics was itself metaphorically defined as a landscape. The environment and its descriptors thus travel across time and space, through and into bodies at molecular and metabolic levels, and across generations. In this paper we explore these multiple scales of 'the environment' through specific case studies of obesity and fetal microchimerism, critically reconceptualising the gendered relationships between bodies, environments and the self. Epigenetics offers a context for rethinking the limits of binaries (nature/nurture; self/other; time and space)- and in focusing on pregnant bodies and intergenerational life course effects we examine the value of such reframings.