Mitochondrial Memory: Transgenerational Trauma, Functional Medicine, and Quantum Physics

Building from Karen Barad’s “diffractive methodological approach” (2007, 71), this article combines Mariella Pandolfi’s notion of the female body as a transgenerational “physiological memoir” (1990, 255) with functional medicine perspectives on mitochondria and advances in quantum physics around “entanglement” to explore a new concept—“mitochondrial memory.” Recent findings in biological research depict a communicating collective of mitochondria distributed across different “human” organs and describe how this collective controls many aspects of human health through epigenetic mechanisms. Since exact copies of mitochondria are inherited through the maternal line, I draw from anthropological theory, functional medicine research, and recent discoveries in physics to offer a speculative and poetic interpretation of mitochondria as vessels containing a multilevel sense of self, allowing for connections within the same maternal line of descent across time and space. I offer autoethnographic anecdotes highlighting the struggles of immigrant women of color—women Donna Haraway might refer to as “cyborg entities” (1991, 149)—thereby framing mitochondrial memory as formed through “naturecultural” and intersectional “intra-actions” (see Barad 2007, 97; Crenshaw 1989; and Haraway 2007, 249).