Gender, Microbial Relations, and the Fermentation of Food1
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Fermentation is the product of microbial relations that mediate, or foment, relationships between bodies and food products. Using cases of food fermentation made with microbes from ruminants’ stomachs and women’s vaginas, we denaturalize the idea of bodies’ mammalian capacity as linked to particular food relations and explore the traction of gendered ideologies that order exchanges between microbial life to result in such food. This essay first outlines our core argument by situating fermentation within the emergent science on bodily microbial relations, or microbiomes. Incorporating science and technology studies literature together with the feminist literature, we note that the association with lactating, first, aligns one gender more closely with nature and, thus, the other with culture while also leading to the conflation of the feminine with the mammalian. Additionally, this structural alignment with species’ nature ignores that making food from bodies requires culture—both in the sense of culturing microbes and in being reliant on technoscientific processes. We then present two seemingly binary case studies, which are together analyzed through their ability to enroll gender and/or disavow gender in order to produce legitimate food products. We conclude by showing how attention to the ordering and disordering work of microbial relations in the fermentation process both opens up new possibilities for recognizing the way that sex and gender materialize in the capacity of mammalian bodies to ferment and emphasizes that fermentation is always entangled with multiple layers of reproductive labor. Ultimately, such analysis extends food studies scholarship about fermentation into the microbial materiality of gender and food.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".