# Community Event: Is the Fetus Really an Organ Transplant? The Limits of Self-Talk in Immunology and Microchimerism Research #### calendar\_today Date and Time **December 12, 2013** 05:00PM - 05:00PM EST #### pin\_drop Location **Plimpton Room (room 133), Barker Center, 12 Quincy Street, Cambridge** Community Event The 2013-2014 Harvard University Gender and Sexuality Seminar Series: The Maternal Imprint sponsored by the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard and the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Is the fetus really an organ transplant? The limits of self-talk in immunology and microchimerism research Aryn Martin Associate Professor, York University (Toronto) Microchimerism is, by definition, the survival and proliferation of genetically "non-self" cells in an organism. When these cells are found spontaneously in a woman, their source is most often presumed to be fetal. As one microchimerism researcher says, "the fetus essentially is a foreign antibody, or antigen, whatever you want to call it. It's a foreign thing that's... you've got to consider it an organ transplant." In the past ten years, attempts to explain "naturally occurring" microchimerism have rendered it unfathomable, and then pathological, and then biologically advantageous. All the while, report upon report confirms that "male" cells can be found in women: in numbers small and large, in many kinds of tissue, in disease and wellness, in mothers and in the childless. Those closest to the phenomenon, a handful of persistent researchers from varied disciplines, speculate constantly about the provenance and role of these "foreign" cells. The language that they inherit from centuries of Western political philosophy - and most directly from microchimerism's artificial sister, organ transplantation - upholds an order of discrete and traceable individuals commonly understood as "self" and "non-self". I argue here that this language and formulation was "good enough" for framing material findings as long as the phenomenon was rare and confined to particular marked bodies, but that its utility has run out. Microchimerism could once be understood as "matter out of place" and interesting for medical and lay audiences alike precisely because of its unnatural, or even supernatural, status (both of which are in keeping with the mythical genealogy of its referent, the Chimaera). But a threshold is crossed if we are all intercorporeal at a cellular level. Meanwhile, microchimerism researchers are beholden to inadequate categories - self/other, male/female, cell/person, natural/made - even as they are daily proving the material inadequacy of these biosocial categories. Aryn Martin is Associate Professor at York University, Toronto, teaching in both Sociology and Science and Technology Studies. Her research and writing concerns social and historical studies of biomedicine, as well as feminist theory. In work that appears in Social Studies of Science, Osiris, Social Problems, Body & Society and elsewhere, Aryn has written about genetic chimaeras, maternal-fetal microchimerism, immunology and pregnancy as phenomena that trouble biological and political notions of the individual. Free and open to the public. The Maternal Imprint seminar series explores 20th- and 21st-century ideas about the influence of a mother’s behaviors, experiences, and physiology on the fate of her growing embryo. Of special focus are the gendered implications of emerging trends in the biomedical sciences – such as epigenetics – presently of broad public and scholarly interest. Additional information is available [here](http://wgs.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k53419&pageid=icb.page625562) Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#) Save: [ Add to calendar calendar\_today ](https://mbb.harvard.edu/node/112066/event-feed.ics) Copy link link