Chemical Entanglements

We aim to formulate both traditional and new avenues for pursuing interdisciplinary research on the topic of chemicals and gender, from mapping the specific sub-disciplines of chemistry in which U.S. women have pursued scientific careers to exploring the non-intuitive intimacies, social ties, and cross-disciplinary affinities that are being made visible by way of a renewed attention to environmental effects on health. For instance, in a Fall 2014 CSW lecture on the topic of the 1984 Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal, India, feminist scientists Deboleena Roy and Banu Subramaniam drew UCLA’s attention to the agency of the non-living actant, methyl isocyanate, to induce birth defects and miscarriages in the women of Madhya Pradesh (among other overmorbidity and overmortality effects), and to the recent history whereby thirty years hence, this same region–which had witnessed 3500 to 8000 deaths and a half a million injuries because of the gas leak—currently finds itself a popular destination for infertile couples from abroad looking for gestational surrogates.[1]  Here we see a remarkable set of events in which the clinical attention following the aftermath of chemical disaster, the commercialization of global reproductive services, and the vast economic unevenness between the global North and South combine to frame the women of Madhya Pradesh as already habituated to their bioavailability, primed for enrollment in gestational labor for the IVF industry. What roles have community scientists and feminist activists played and what roles can they come to play in this scenario?

More recently, Vanessa Agard-Jones, in the course of her research into same-sex desire in Martinique, has eloquently made a case for the need for cross-disciplinary methods that pay attention to what kinds of stories are told regarding the legacy of pesticide exposure on descendants of plantation workers.[2] How do ethnographies that intersect with the itineraries of such environmental toxins address the ecological damage and health costs linked to such chemicals but also refuse frameworks that tabulate transgender identity and same-sex desire as part of those costs? A different approach to the intersection of the topics of chemicals and gender is further suggested by civil engineer Anne Steinemann as well as the Rachel Carson Institute on the presence of hazardous and endocrine -disrupting chemicals in common household products finding their way into living room dust. Chemical interactions happen increasingly in the domestic zone of the household or the sealed-in office space with environmental illness being registered in relation not only to noxious and visible clouds (as in the Bhopal gas leak) but in relation to perfumed and invisible scents from personal care products and cleaning agents advertised heavily to women. Referred to as sick building syndrome, afflictions linked to indoor air pollution might be newly studied with respect to the growing field of exposomics. What kinds of data are being collected and stories being told in relation to these quotidian exposures?

Finally, a novel approach to chemical entanglement is suggested by the work of Hannah Landecker on the chemical relation between bodies and foods suggested by new developments in epigenetics and microbiome sciences. In Landecker’s estimation, the registration of ways in which genetic material or ingested organisms are not immediately turned into fuel or building blocks but persist in the body of the eater suggests that populations are more intimately governed by what they eat—the genetic information of other species that we consume doesn’t leave us even after we burn away the energy they supply. Further, a closer kinship exists between the separate zones of genetics (thought to govern the reproduction of traits across generations) and metabolism (imagined as a system of chemical conversions of food into energy by which the organism maintains itself across the life course). New intimacies between sub-disciplines, in other words, are also being suggested by biochemical research on the effects of food.