ABSTRACT
This chapter deepens the conceptual framing of the book and makes closer links with the relevant literature. Instead of simply describing immunity, the chapter is organised around the theme of immunity’s productive nature – what immunity can do – derived from assemblage theory and new materialism. The chapter locates the assemblage analytic in relevant socio-cultural accounts of immunity, with reference to Donna Haraway, Emily Martin, Ed Cohen, Margrit Shildrick, Eula Biss and Nik Brown, among others. The chapter introduces and discusses immunity’s complexities and its somewhat paradoxical qualities. Key concepts are: milieu interieur, which provides immunity with an epistemological focus on the microscopic operation of tissue inside the body, and; possessive individualism, which, partly through the ideas of self-defence and milieu interieur, accentuates the notion of immunity as a personal realm of action and therefore consumption. Continuing this critical approach, the chapter also considers the limits of immunitary self-defence found in autoimmune diseases, species reproduction, and the phenomena of maternal and transplantation microchimerism.
