Weighing the Future - (Critical Environments: Nature, Science, and Politics) by Natali Valdez (Paperback)

About the Book

"Epigenetics is the study of heritable changes in gene expression and has been heralded as one of the most promising new fields of scientific inquiry. Current large-scale pregnancy studies draw on epigenetics to connect pregnant women's behavioral choices, like diet and exercise, to future health risks for unborn babies. As the first ethnography of its kind, Weighing the Future examines the sociopolitical implications of ongoing pregnancy trials in the United States and the United Kingdom, illuminating how processes of scientific knowledge production are linked to capitalism, surveillance, and environmental reproduction. The environments we imagine to shape our genes, bodies, and future health are tied to race, gender, and structures of inequality. This groundbreaking book makes the case that science, and how we translate it, is a reproductive project that requires feminist vigilance. Instead of fixating on a future at risk, this book brings attention to the present at stake"--

Book Synopsis

Epigenetics, the study of heritable changes in gene expression, has been heralded as one of the most promising new fields of scientific inquiry. Current large-scale studies selectively draw on epigenetics to connect behavioral choices made by pregnant people, such as diet and exercise, to health risks for future generations. As the first ethnography of its kind, Weighing the Future examines the sociopolitical implications of ongoing pregnancy trials in the United States and the United Kingdom, illuminating how processes of scientific knowledge production are linked to capitalism, surveillance, and environmental reproduction. Natali Valdez argues that a focus on individual behavior rather than social environments ignores the vital impacts of systemic racism. The environments we imagine to shape our genes, bodies, and future health are intimately tied to race, gender, and structures of inequality. This groundbreaking book makes the case that science, and how we translate it, is a reproductive project that requires feminist vigilance. Instead of fixating on a future at risk, this book brings attention to the present at stake.

From the Back Cover

"What happens when we recruit maternal bodies that economize predictive risk based on race, class, and obesity? Weighing the Future reveals that although prenatal trials are misaligned, they continue to scaffold scientific knowledge and portent future 'value.' Valdez has given us an astounding book that challenges our embrace of epigenetics, urging us to critique how capitalist interests make racialized, classed, and 'nonnormative' pregnant bodies individually accountable for the future."--Dána-Ain Davis, author of Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth

"Weighing the Future brilliantly exposes how cutting-edge science fosters the same old racialized narratives of health. Carefully detailed, analytically nuanced, politically engaged, and ethnographically rich, Valdez chronicles how histories of race continue to shape science's views of pregnancy and the pregnant body. A must-read book for our times."--Banu Subramaniam, author of Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity

"Weighing the Future offers a fascinating and provocative account of how the new science of epigenetics has been folded into preexisting paradigms that locate reproductive risk primarily within women's bodies. In one brilliant chapter after another, Natali Valdez demonstrates how 'the environment' became understood as a matter of individual women's behaviors, foreclosing a more capacious, structurally oriented instantiation of epigenetics. A crucial intervention into contemporary debates about reproductive health and medicine, this book is a must-read for scholars, medical researchers, and clinicians."--Rene Almeling, author of GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men's Reproductive Health

Review Quotes

"A ground-breaking book, both subtle and razor-sharp in its analysis. It provides an immensely valuable critique of the workings of epigenetic foreclosure in pregnancy trials."-- "Medical Anthropology Quarterly"

About the Author

Natali Valdez is Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Wellesley College.