Race as a Charismatic Variable: The Epistemological Tensions of Race-Adjusted Technologies in Clinical Research and Patient-Doctor Interactions

Abstract: Actor-network theory (ANT) emerged from the work of Bruno Latour, who argues that human and non-human elements, such as people, technologies, and discourses, function as actants collectively producing and constituting relational networks that shape material realities. ANT can be applied to the medical domain, which contains ethical and theoretical tensions: race serves as both a “charismatic variable” that simultaneously hypervisibilizes statistical patterns and clinical data while invisibilizing embodied experiences. The supposed natural, biological categories of race are entangled in the sociality of interpersonal interaction, a political ethos, and the rising international networks of knowledge and material commodities. Drawing on Latour’s critique that “we have never been modern,” I analyze how race simultaneously operates as a purified category that constructs supposedly legible bodies and diagnostic tools while constituting hybrid networks that undermine the possibility of purification and binary categories. Race is established as a “fact” of identity in the U.S., one in which modern thinkers attempt to purify into something exclusively biological or exclusively social—but never both. I aim to ask: How does the construction of race as an epistemological project serve to invisiblize the networks and mechanisms that impact our lives as racialized beings? This paper examines race-adjusted medical technologies, such as eGFR measurements and pulmonary function tests, to investigate why race persists as a charismatic variable in risk-based medical research despite its epistemological contradictions.

Keywords: Race-adjusted medical technologies, Epistemology of race, Actor-network theory