Kelly E. Happe, The Material Gene: Gender, Race, and Heredity after the Human Genome Project, New York: New York University Press, 2013, 287 pages, $24.00, 978-0-8147-9068-7.

These days there is much discussion about epigenetics, a relatively new science that in focusing on the environmental effects on genetic expression is recasting understandings of heredity, health disparities, and, hence. race. Based on my reading of Kelly Happe’s The Material Gene, the epigenetic turn may be less paradigm-shifting than it appears. In this ground-breaking book Happe questions whether any science concerned with race and genomics will not reinscribe problematic notions of race.

Happe’s concern with genomics is its inseparability from the legacy of eugenics, “a cultural logic that translates the pathologies of economic and social relations into pathologies of bodies – inherited at birth and immune to change” (page 7). She is especially critical of the Human Genome Project (HGP), the conceit of which was that deviance and deficiency could be diagnosed, explained, and cured through “objectively” locating the relevant genetic markers for undesirable traits and conditions. In Happe’s eyes, the HGP not only made genetic material available as new sources of capital accumulation, in that way marking the beginning of the age of biocapital; it also provided new, apolitical justifications for social problems and social disparities, conveniently at a time when support for welfare programs was eroding. Since the HGP, genomic explanations of disease patterns found in racialized populations continue to displace models of disease that treat it as the materialization of embodied life, or as she pithily puts it, “how oppression gets under the skin” (page 6).

Much of the book is devoted to discussing the implications of locating the so-called breast cancer gene (BRCA) in terms of medical practice and gender and racial ideology. Crucially, isolation of BRCA (later BRCA1 and BRCA2) provided a “significant achievement for the genetics community” (page 53). Findings that carrying some mutations of these genes increased the probability of developing breast cancer allowed genetics researchers to negate more explicitly politicized research on the environmental causes of breast cancer. Such findings also accomplished a synecdochal turn: geneticists equated the identification of these genes with both a causal explanation of breast cancer and a cure. This led the way to prophylactic mastectomies (and later ovary removal) for those who carried mutations of this gene, despite that these mutations were associated with only a small percentage of breast cancer cases and despite the lack of evidence that the mutations actually cause breast, ovarian, and uterine cancers. Today, an astonishing 300,000 prophylactic oophorectomies (ovary removals) occur each year in the United States, according to Happe.

Happe’s point, however, is not simply that these surgeries may be unnecessary; rather, counseling whether to elect these surgeries largely invokes gender norms and race ideologies. To wit, she tells how the advice (white) women are given in choosing whether to undergo surgery is largely dependent on their plans for childbearing. Oopherectomey is recommended if a woman no longer wishes to be or can no longer be pregnant, thus reducing her personhood to her reproductive functions and presuming that her ovaries serve no function after child-bearing. However, African American women are almost always counseled to undergo the surgery, which Happe contends extends a long tradition in medicine of managing black fertility. These are some of the ways that Happe contends genomics produces bodies that conform to the social and economic order.

For me the highlight of The Material Gene was its stunning indictment of epidemiology and health disparities research. Echoing a point made by environmental historian Linda Nash (2006), Happe discusses the problem with using “race” as a variable in such research. While the intent is to prove disparity as a way to enable advocates to combat racism, such an approach decontextualizes “race” from “the array of factors associated with lived experience” (page 111) so to biologize race. Put differently, because a multivariate model will inevitably show the variable race to predict a health problem, it reinscribes race as a biological given (not a history). Owing to the black-boxing of race the variable, health disparities research, she asserts, is undertheorized.

Happe then carries this critique a step further by showing how this approach, which treats susceptibility as something one inherits rather than acquires, problematizes black bodies. That is, if people with a particular genetic mutation are more susceptible to environmental harm – here the issue is that African Americans tend to test disproportionately positive for one of the breast cancer mutations – then the problem comes to lie with their bodies and not with the pollutants. Following Ladelle McWhorter (2009), race is subtly recast as abnormality or deficiency, and the solution then becomes better self care, depoliticizing the fact of environmental pollution. Happe’s point is a strong one, and her ultimate conclusions in support of environmental justice movements and biomonitoring rests on the observation that they do not engage genetic causes of environmental harm and focus on embodied experience or verifiable body burden.

Put together, Happe’s analysis appears to be also an indictment of environment-gene interaction science, of which epigenetics is a part. Happe actually gives short shrift to epigenetics – an absence that I assume was more about the timing of the research or perhaps the need to retain a tighter focus than its irrelevance. Through her brief discussions, however, one gathers that in her view, epigenetics doesn’t move far afield from the discourse of heredity, as thus far it appears that environmentally induced changes that can be inherited are getting the lion’s share of attention in epigenetics research. It is true that the neo-Lamarkian bent of epigenetics, with its emphasis on how traits and conditions can be acquired in life time through various exposures and stresses, can still do the damage of pathologizing difference. Yet, it seems to me that many of the points Happe raises have the potential to be rethought through epigenetic frameworks, which also seem to support ideas of “how oppression gets under the skin.”

What is eminently clear is that The Material Gene is wonderful to think with, and Happe has made a significant contribution to the evolving literature on race, gender, biopolitics, and bioscience, especially in relation to environmental health. I highly recommend the book for the careful read it deserves. 

References

McWhorter L (2009) Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Nash L (2006) Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press.