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Paper 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?