Becoming-HeLa: Towards an Ethico-Onto-Epistemology of Grief

Abstract

When she died in 1951, Henrietta Lacks was a thirty-one-year-old Black descendent of slaves living with her husband and five children in Baltimore. The so-called “immortal” cells from her fatal cervical carcinoma were taken without her knowledge or consent. When we talk about Henrietta Lacks or when we do research with HeLa cells, we are working with(in) entanglements—the entanglement of race, gender, class, and sexuality in the sciences and the entanglement of epistemology, ontology, and ethics. In producing and analyzing applications and representations of the cell line and its unknowing donor, I suggest the concept of grief as an ethico-onto-epistemological tool with the potential to yield more accountable uses of HeLa cells and to do justice to Henrietta Lacks. Drawing from feminist new materialism, science and technology studies, continental philosophy, philosophy and anthropology of science, and posthuman ethics, I employ a diffractive methodology to envision transformative practices that take seriously the construction and histories of race and gender in knowledge-making processes. I diffract the non-philosophy of François Laruelle and the philosophy-physics of Karen Barad, the Cambridge Reference Sequence of mitochondrial DNA and Cynthia Verspaget’s bioartwork The Anarchy Cell Line, and scientific and popular genealogies of HeLa cells and Henrietta Lacks to expose the porousness of boundaries between what appear to be separate entities—subject/object, science/culture—and to map the effects of their differences. Such a mapping disrupts linearity, breaks through dialectical negations, calls practices into account, and allows for the possibility to actualize new futures with different effects. What is at stake is a life-affirming relationality with difference, be it in cellular, (post)human, or any other form. The thesis aims at specifying new ways of becoming with HeLa cells in a manner both conceptually creative and rigorously objective: accountable for marks on bodies through partial and situated knowledge claims. The author has chosen not to allow open access as this work will be continued in future projects. For access to this thesis, please contact the author via Academia.edu.