“Mombrain and Sticky DNA”: The Impacts of Neurobiological and Epigenetic Framings of Motherhood on Women's Subjectivities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The fields of epigenetics and neuroscience have come to occupy a significant place in individual and public life in biomedicalized societies. Social scientists have argued that the primacy and popularization of the "neuro" has begun to shape how patients and other lay people experience themselves and their lifeworlds in increasingly neurological and genetic terms. Pregnant women and new mothers have become an important new target for cutting edge neuroscientific and epigenetic research, with the Internet constituting a highly active space for engagement with knowledge translations. In this paper, we analyze the reception by women in North America of translations of nascent epigenetic and neuroscientific research. We conducted three focus groups with pregnant women and new mothers. The study was informed by a prior scoping investigation of online content. Our focus group findings record how engagement with translations of epigenetic and neuroscientific research impact women's perinatal experience, wellbeing, and self-construal. Three themes emerged in our analysis: (1) A kind of brain; (2) The looping effects of biomedical narratives; (3) Imprints of past experience and the management of the future. This data reveals how mothers engage with the neurobiological style-of-thought increasingly characteristic of public health and popular science messaging around pregnancy and motherhood. Through the molecularization of pregnancy and child development, a typical passage of life becomes saturated with "susceptibility," "risk," and the imperative to preemptively make "healthy' choices." This, in turn, redefines and shapes the experience of what it is to be a "good," "healthy," or "responsible" mother/to-be.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 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".