95. The Microbial Body

The human body is increasingly imagined not as a bounded, singular organism but as a multispecies ecology: bacteria, fungi, archaea, and viruses outnumber human cells and actively shape physiology, immunity, and development. This panel asks how art, visual culture, philosophy, and literature represent this microbial body, and what is at stake when inherited ideas of bodily boundary, individuality, and selfhood are unsettled by microbial entanglement.

Body-mapping the mycobiome and the maternal microbiome (see Anderson-Tempini forthcoming 2027 and Dupre, Drawing Processes of Life, Intellect, 2023) offers one model for rendering microbial life visible on and within the body, building on the reframing of organisms as communities of microbial collaborators in Lynn Margulis’s Symbiotic Planet (1998) and popularised by Ed Yong’s I Contain Multitudes (2016). This session asks what such rendering means representationally and conceptually, alongside STS perspectives, philosophy of biological individuality, and literary analyses of microbial figuration. How do art and visual culture visualise, narrate, or conceptualise microbial life within and as the body? What consequences, philosophical, political, or imaginative, follow from picturing the body as inherently multispecies?

We welcome papers addressing artistic and visual representations of the microbial body/microbiome, alongside scientific, literary, or historical perspectives; questions of bodily boundary, contamination, symbiosis, and kinship; feminist and gender perspectives on microbial embodiment, including reproduction and lactation; and methodological approaches drawing together art, science, and the humanities.

Themes: Contemporary art, interdisciplinary, microbes

Additional format comment: The session will include short papers followed by a roundtable discussion.

Lead Convenor: Gemma Anderson-Tempini, University of Exeter, United Kingdom

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.