The Cyborg Politics of Milk Microbiota

Human-microbial relations have been articulated as a model for envisioning multispecies justice. This vision has been figured according to the way that the dominant Western individualist conception of the human is unsettled by the fact of our dependence upon the microbes present in our bodies, which far outnumber our human cells. In response, in this paper I show that this vision has to contend with the challenge that our microbial encounters in food production are mediated by the technoscientific worldview, which shapes our knowledge and relationships with microbes according to biopolitics of prevention and control. Taking milk as a paradigm of how biopolitics shapes food production practices, I show how the management of microbiota through different milk-based foods—from milk, and cheese, to precision-fermented milk in engineering biology—manifests a biopolitics of control and prevention that is based in dominant gendered understandings of reproductive bodies of women and animals. I then show how Donna Haraway’s account of cyborg politics manifests a subordination of the natural and organic to the technological, and that this presents a paradox for its aptness to envisioning multispecies justice through microbial encounters.