Body, gender and technosciences: menstrual blood's "stem cells"

Abstract

This research's general objective is to think about different agencies of body fluids and substances, especially menstrual blood. Departing from a discussion about the ways bodies and narratives are present in the universe of contemporary technosciences, this research asks about the engagements, the "multiple ontologies" of menstrual blood. This project focuses specifically on the use of menstrual blood as a substrate for producing cells in a laboratory, aiming to produce scientific research, and eventually therapies in the fields of cell therapy, regenerative medicine and bioengineering. At the Cellular and Molecular Cardiology Laboratory (LCCM) at the Institute of Biophysics Carlos Chagas Filho, from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, it is expected that the menstrual blood is converted into the "CeSaM", an acronym for "Mesenquimal-derived stromal menstrual blood stem cell" in Portuguese. The purpose of this research has been to put in evidence, with a socioanthropological work, narratives (including the visual ones) from the cell life of CeSaM, and its potencies. I propose a "simpoiesis" with the CeSaM, which involves accompanying these cell's lives in and out of the laboratory, and to do this "with" the researchers that cultivate these cells in their professional lives. We also intend to analyze the communication and repercussion of national and international scientific papers about the CeSaM in social networks and newspaper articles, with the use of alternative metrics, the so-called altmetrics, as well as to evaluate how this research's thematics tend to (and can) be communicated by science communicators. We expect this collectively constituted ethnographic approach may allows us to contribute critically, and creatively, to the discussion and publicization of this type of contemporary Brazilian technoscience. (AU)