"Your Mother's Always with You": Material Feminism and Fetomaternal Microchimerism (Clinical Report‪)‬

This article considers fetomaternal microchimerism in light of important theoretical interventions that entreat feminists to take biological materiality into account. Researchers describe fetomaternal microchimerism as the persistence after pregnancy, in women and their children, of cells acquired through two-way traffic during pregnancy. The present discursive framing of the phenomenon is suspect from a feminist perspective: it naturalizes mother-child bonding to the exclusion of fathers and non-genetic parents, and it implies that women's proper individuality is compromised perpetually in the wake of childbirth or abortion. Despite these reservations about how microchimerism is being materialized, its ineffable reality invites feminist reflection: What does it mean for women and for feminism if we really do embody one another at the cellular level? Introduction: Feminist Materialisms in Technoscience Studies