Thinking with Termites about Fractious Futures for Fecal Microbiota Transplantation in the United States

Fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) involves transferring fecal material from a donor to a recipient. To think about more expansive and inclusive possible futures for FMT, in particular for people in the United States, it may be helpful to think with termites—their communities, the communities within them, and the community they may inadvertently provide to humans. This essay thinks with termites to explore several frictions in FMT in the US that shape its possible futures. The first friction explored is that FMT is human and (has always been) more than human, discussing both termites as ambivalent kin and the struggles of the regulation to understand FMT as transplantation. The second friction is that the curative imagination for FMT is discordant; examining medical researcher and practitioner discussion of potential FMT donor criteria and potential recipients illuminates the inconsistent insistence that people and guts are both malleable and fixed. FMT renders some donors and microbe communities as good or bad, healthy or sick, donor or recipient, but it’s much more complicated. The third friction is that FMT may be over, with recent US Food and Drug Administration approvals of pharmaceuticals that claim to supplant FMT. Thinking with other life forms that use and perform their own kinds of FMT, such as termites, may help inspire alternative, more inclusive futures for FMT.