Technoscientific Musings at WUSTL

The first piece, “The Science and Business of Genetic Testing” started me off by thinking about the dangerous ways that this practice can develop. We live in an era of strong identity politics so there is a way in which DNA tests that quantify identity could lead to people placing larger claims on certain experiences over other people that could potentially have had a more direct/salient experience. On top of that, the quantification could epistemologically cement race as biological, because of the ways in which the obfuscation of method lets the businesses get away with the dishonest/violent practice of essentialization. Following from that, the tests themselves are inherently accurate and so what does it mean that businesses can create these technologies which radically alter perceptions of the self? If one’s test said they were 13% Algerian, that 1) cements the nation state of Algeria and its borders as inherently authentic and pre-existing/historic 2) somehow imposes an ‘Algerian’ identity onto the individual that would lead them to believing that their set of lived experiences correlate to some ‘Algerianness’ or that they are owed some sort of authentic ‘Algerian’ experience that has been robbed from them. What I mean to say is that there is a way in which this could radically alter identity formation (in unknowable ways) and cement historically fluid categories of culture/”race” all in order to ‘sell’ a product.

Next is the “DNA and Native American Identity”, where Kimberly Tallbear investigates the technoscience involved in gatekeeping Native American identity. This kind of DNA testing could potentially obfuscate the violence inherent in the settler state apparatus—indigeneity being linked to a DNA test, which also tells you what race/origin percentages you hold, turns indigeneity into a ‘race’, thus technologically erasing the sovereign nationhood debted to indigenous and Native American identity. So what kinds of politics are being trafficked when these (usually white) settler capitalist endeavors of DNA corporations push and lobby First Nations to adopt their technologies? The necessity of proving authentic indigeneity is incredibly vital for First Nations as kinship is deeply tied to blood, but in what ways do settler technologies disturb this?  I realize now having read the Bardill piece after writing this, how this is sort of in conversation.

The Wagner book also discussed a little bit of this, the kind of techno-scientification of kinship bonds, transforming worlds and realities within a few tests. It’s difficult to conceptualize how radically people's worlds change when finding relatives’ bodies, and what kind of structural reality that entails for people on the ground.