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- Convenors:
-
David Griffiths
(University of Surrey)
Poppy Budworth (University of Liverpool)
Órla Meadhbh Murray (Northumbria University Newcastle)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
Gut Futures explores health conditions, microbiome science, and everyday strategies for negotiating gut distress. Engaging queer and crip approaches, we focus on the politics of digestion, care practices and the technoscientific imaginaries which might shape resilient and inclusive futures.
Description
Gut Futures explores the digestive system as a locus of politics and care, by investigating health conditions and treatments. These include irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and stomas, alongside microbiome science and everyday strategies for negotiating gut distress. In this panel we foreground non-normative guts as important sources of insight. The gut here is metaphorical and material, a naturalcultural site which disrupts assumptions of bodily autonomy, individuality and purity.
Microbiome research, pharmaceutical developments and smart health innovations promise futures of gut optimisation. For people with chronic gut conditions, however, futures can look uncertain, and temporalities can be structured, interrupted and punctuated with stigma, embarrassment, delayed diagnosis and inaccessible care. Importantly, individuals also find joy, interdependencies and bodily acceptance with and through their guts. Gender, race and sexuality intersect with issues of the gut, leading to different health needs, experiences of health services, and outcomes.
The gut is a multispecies ecology where microbial, human, inorganic and technological agencies co-produce bodies, environments and experiences. Drawing on queer and crip approaches to embodiment, we explore how digestive experiences challenge normative rhythms of productivity, movement and wellness. For example, ‘crip time’ invites us to rethink infrastructures like toilet access, clinical pathways and material supports including stoma supplies, emergency equipment and pharmaceuticals.
We welcome contributions which explore the gut as a site of governance, care, stigma, or speculation, including topics such as:
• gut-brain axis science and the politics of emotion
• public toilets and spatial justice
• microbiome research, gut tech and imagined futures
• queer/crip experiences of IBD, IBS and stoma care
• care-full and creative methodologies for studying guts
• food, pharmaceuticals and everyday survival strategies
By situating guts within STS debates on resilience, futures and multispecies care, this panel invites participants to rethink the politics and possibilities of digestion, opening up more just and liveable Gut Futures.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
At-home gut microbiome testing invites consumers to engage in new modes of speculating and imagining both bodies and futures through stool. Through expanding access to this gut tech, I ask: which bodies are produced and reproduced through commercial gut microbiome testing? What are their futures?
Paper long abstract
Benefiting from advances in gene sequencing technologies, for-profit companies including ZOE Limited and Chuckling Goat LTD now offer direct-to-consumer test kits which promise to improve experiences of IBS and IBD through producing knowledge of the gut which can be used in balancing the microbiome (Zoe, 2025).
Alongside representing a shift in where the microbiome is being produced and conceptualised (e.g. Benezra, 2023; Laursen et al., 2024), the growing popularity of at-home gut microbiome testing services combined with the shrinking – yet still prohibitive – cost presents a growing community building metagenomic bodies.
Whereas commercial genomics has been the subject of much social science engagement (e.g. Levina, 2010; Lee, 2013; Tallbear, 2015), at-home metagenomic testing represents a site of body- and future-making which is yet to be robustly engaged with. My (planned) focus group aims to partially reimburse the cost of these tests, facilitating access to commercial metagenomics among demographics who find the cost too great, to both improve access and consider how non-normative consumer bodies speculate and are speculated.
Through bringing together diverse and perhaps unusual consumers of at-home gut microbiome tests resident in Totnes to share their experiences of this gut technology in a focus group, I begin to address this gap and seek to explore: what bodies are produced and reproduced through gut testing? What futures do they have and seek? What anxieties are the inscribed with? How are they regulated?
Paper short abstract
Based on ethnographic research at a microbiome nutrition startup, this paper shows how dietitians’ invisible affective labor mediates between microbiome data and users, sustaining personalization, the commodification of microbiome science, and the promise of AI-driven biomedicine.
Paper long abstract
Microbiome-based health products are a rapidly growing sector of the global health and wellness market, and a dynamic site of scientific, financial, and cultural interest in precision medicine. Drawing on an ethnographic study of a leading microbiome-based personalized nutrition start-up, we explore how the human gut microbiome is being commodified and negotiated in human practice. We employ a critical feminist lens to foreground the embodied and affective labors that translate microbiome science into consumer-facing services and enact ‘personalized nutrition’ as their target. Our findings highlight the largely invisible work of dietitians, who mediate between scientific claims on the gut microbiome and their imperfect realization as a consumer health application. Dietitians’ work bridges the tensions between the datafied and relational dimensions of personalized nutrition in three key respects: producing data about users, articulating the novelty and excitement of the product, and translating the microbiome into actionable, meaningful nutritional advice. These affective and conceptual achievements sustain the promise of a microbiome-based “revolution” in biomedicine and drive the increasing commodification of microbiome science. More broadly, we draw attention to the human labor, often minimized, that mediates AI-driven science in the biotech industry.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on research with young people (19-33) who live with an ostomy, this paper challenges normative understandings of disability, youth, and the life-course. It does so through the conceptual lens of chronicity - the negotiations with, and embracement of, the enduring state of chronic illness.
Paper long abstract
This paper challenges normative understandings of youth, disability, and the life-course through the conceptual lens of chronicity – the negotiations with, and embracement of, the enduring state of chronic illness; drawing on empirical data from flexible qualitative research with fourteen young people aged 19-33 in the UK, who live with or previously lived with, an ileostomy or colostomy. Ileostomy and colostomy surgery exteriorises a portion of the intestine to divert poo outside the body; the bowel on the exterior is referred to as an ostomy or stoma. This paper contributes to social science debates about normative time through the utilisation of crip theory. I frame my argument around participants’ negotiations with permanent stoma surgery as these findings reveal the pervasiveness of ‘normal’ and how the desire and pressure to experience normative youthhood significantly shapes disabled people’s lives and bodies. Furthermore, findings related to chronicity highlight how some young disabled people actively resist ‘normal’ and challenge assumptions about what they ‘should’ do, be, and look like, in relation to able-bodiedness, linear life-courses, and youthhood. From discussions in this paper, I recommend social scientists interested in youth and disability consider crip theory as a generative lens to understand people’s everyday and embodied lives in relational, imaginative, and inclusive ways.
Key words: Normativity, chronicity, disability, youth, lifecourse, crip time
Paper short abstract
I think from the gut, considering the convergence of bottoming, the microbiome, and clinical experience. As a gay man who bottoms and has ulcerative colitis, I combine queer theory, feminist science studies, and embodied crip gut knowledge, to generate resources for imagining futures otherwise.
Paper long abstract
In this paper I theorise the gut as a naturalcultural site where sexual practices, multispecies ecologies, and chronic illness converge. I write from a position of embodied knowledge; I am a gay man who bottoms, who also has ulcerative colitis. The paper performs the cripistemological claim it advances: that non-normative gut knowledge is legitimate and necessary. I open with openings. Thinking with queer scholars of bottoming and receptive anal eroticism, I establish the non-sovereign, porous subject as both philosophical and biological. The (bottom of the) gut is where the ethics of opening and hospitality meets the politics of inflammation. UC is an autoimmune condition in which the body attacks its own mucosal lining, failing to distinguish self from non-self. This turns the openness that queer thinking celebrates into a site of damage. The rectum is both the site of queer theory’s shattering, and the body’s autoimmune self-attack. Reading microbiome science through feminist new materialist frameworks, I argue that the gut is a multispecies assemblage, always already opened up to microbial strangers. Furthermore, drugs are taken into the body to sustain sexual practices of bodily opening. In the clinic, however, I have faced normalising assumptions from medical professionals where PrEP becomes a flag for pathology. Finally, I propose that the temporalities of gut troubles – flare, remission, urgency, uncertainty – offer resources for imagining gut futures oriented toward accommodation and multispecies flourishing rather than the restoration of normative function.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines the complexity of building a crip gut community across difference through reflections on running a gut peer support group at a mental health recovery college alongside autoethnographic reflections and queer crip theory.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines the complexity of making community with others around gut conditions, specifically dynamics of stigma and pride at the intersections of queerness and disability. Beginning with autoethnographic reflections on my experience of being diagnosed with ulcerative colitis and having semi-elective ileostomy (stoma) surgery, I consider how stigmatising discourses around ‘normality’ are used in stoma-related discourses in queerphobic and ableist ways. Using Kafer’s (2013) political/relational model of disability alongside broader feminist work on the gut (Wilson, 2015; Dryden, 2022a, 2022b, 2023), I interrogate the experience of having crip guts – “non-normative digestive processing, nutritional disabilities or other disabilities related to the gut” (Kolářová, Stöckelová and Senft, 2023, p. 1255). In particular, I consider dynamics around ‘coming out’ as having a stoma and being queer, the role of stigma and pride in navigating becoming an ostomate, and similarities between ostomates and many queer and trans people around (un)expected bodies. I argue for queer stoma pride and crip guts community making across difference as a critical response to discourses of normality around crip guts and as a potential site of coalitional politics between differently positioned queer and/or disabled people. From this, I will discuss my ongoing work to create a crip gut community and community-led research through gut-focused peer support groups and workshops at a mental health recovery college in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. This work attempts to create crip kinship across multiple gut experiences and turn individualised private experiences of gut distress into collective coalition building across difference.