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Introduction Toxic Embodiment and Feminist

Environmental Humanities

O LGA C I E L EM ĘC KA Turku Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Turku, Finland

C E C I L I A Å S B E R G Department of Thematic Studies, Linköping University, Sweden

T his special section on toxic embodiment examines variously situated bodies, land-

and waterscapes and their naturalcultural interactions with toxicity.1 The ideas of

toxic embodiment play out in the social imaginaries of science and popular culture.

Toxins have become a widespread and well-known threat to life on the planet, accom-

panied by iconic photographs of dead killer whales washed ashore. Infertile orcas with

extreme levels of PCB (polychlorinated biphenyl) in their system bring to the environ-

mental social imaginary the toxic kinship of predators and other species, including hu-

mans, threatened by extinction. The cumulative exposure to endocrine disruptors, neu-

rotoxins, asthmagens, carcinogens, and mutagens comes with everyday life today,

making us all toxic bodies. In our present situation, the theme of toxic embodiment em-

braces extensive existential concerns around health and environment as we all interact

with climate change, antibiotics, and untested chemical cocktails through the food we

eat, the makeup we wear, the new sofas we sit on, or the environments in which we

dwell. Without doubt, we also become more acutely aware today of how we are in na-

ture, and nature, polluted as it may be, is in us. Terms like bio-burden or bioaccumula-

tion circulate widely in the environmental social imaginary, injected by imagery and

terminology from the natural sciences and popular culture. Bioaccumulation describes

for instance the processes by which toxic substances, industrial waste or human-made

chemical compounds, gradually accumulate in living tissue. The highest concentrations

of toxic pollutants find their way into organisms at the higher trophic levels of the

1. The concept of natureculture originates in Donna Haraway’s The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs,

People, and Significant Otherness.

Environmental Humanities 11:1 (May 2019) DOI 10.1215/22011919-7349433 © 2019 Olga Cielemęcka and Cecilia Åsberg This is an open access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

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ecological chain of being in a process known as biomagnification, but human-altered

chemistries spread across vast regions of the planet, even in the deepest depths of

the sea.

The ubiquity of toxins in our bodies is certainly an alarming environmental con-

cern: industries leak waste into rivers and oceans, meteorological conditions transport

contaminants to the breast milk of humans and other mammals in polar zones, plastics

seep endocrine disruptors into a myriad of sea and land living organisms.2 To deploy

feminist environmental humanities scholar Stacy Alaimo’s influential notions of expo-

sure and trans-corporeality,3 the trans-corporeal transits of toxicity seem to spare no

place and no body. Environmental justice scholar Giovanna Di Chiro underlines in the

trailblazing volume Queer Ecologies that there is good reason for public alarm concerning

the continued use, circulation, and accumulation of (sometimes long since forbidden)

toxic chemicals as they are wreaking havoc on the health and reproductive possibilities

of the living world.4 However, Di Chiro along with transfeminist scholars Eva Hayward

and Malin Ah-King,5 criticize the often sensationalist focus on “gender-bending” effects

of endocrine-disrupting chemicals as rooted in antiqueer normativity. Their focus traces

the gendered, racialized, ableist, and heteronormative patterns of mainstream environ-

mentalism, exposing the ways in which the perceived feminization of nature, with cas-

trating chemicals, low sperm counts, and reproductive and genital neoformations, is

presented as the ultimate risk scenario of much antitoxic discourses. Such antitoxic dis-

course gets infused with a “polluted politics”6 and “toxic sexism” where feminized mon-

strous, queer, or crip bodies again get cast as deviant, impure, or contaminated. In the

process, titillating as it may be in word choices or imagery of popular environmental-

ism, a range of other threats of mortality and morbidity, cancerous ecologies and extir-

pated habitats gets glossed over. From the pioneering work of Rachel Carson to Vanessa

Agard-Jones’s pathbreaking research on toxic burdens, feminist and queer environmen-

tal perspectives intersect with decolonial, antiracist, and indigenous ones, to pave the

way for understanding how the toxicity of our environments is intertwined with power

relations understood as toxic: racism, settler-colonial violence, corporate greed, milita-

rism, and toxic masculinities. The important question is who gets to live, play, thrive,

and survive, and who gets to suffer and die from the “slow violence”7 of toxic com-

pounds and socioeconomic vulnerability.

With toxic pollutants as a rising threat, important questions about environmental

justice, gender, and the sexual politics of environmental movements issue an urgent

2. Neimanis, Åsberg, and Hedrén, “Four Problems, Four Directions for Environmental Humanities.”

3. For exposure, see Alaimo, Exposed; for trans-corporeality, see Alaimo, Bodily Natures.

4. Di Chiro, “Polluted Politics?”

5. Ah-King and Hayward, “Toxic Sexes.”

6. Di Chiro, “Polluted Politics?”

7. Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor.

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challenge to intersectional gender and science studies; to anticolonial, queer, and trans

theory; as well as to environmental and human-animal studies at large. Taking up this

challenge, this special section aims at attending to the ways toxic embodiment disturbs

or aligns with multiple boundaries of sexes, generations, races, geographies, nation-

states, and species and how toxicity has re-dynamized corporeality and the biochemical

materiality of bodies.8 And for sure, our call for papers evoked a range of critical and cre-

ative responses to how existential concerns around health in the Anthropocene put

bodies and toxicity firmly at the center of the environmental humanities.

The range and richness of the submissions we received testify to the vitality of the

concern for environmental health among feminist, queer, creative, and environmental

scholars. The original research papers and essays we selected represent a number of

environmental humanities subfields, and they demonstrate a variety of theoretical ap-

proaches to the topic of toxic embodiment. Together, they trace a trajectory from an ini-

tial understanding of the oppressiveness of toxic politics and environmental injustice to

a subsequent recuperation of their potential as sites of shared vulnerability and activ-

ism. Any exertion to think in new ways about toxic embodiment requires renewed

attention to cultural interpellation and lively social processes as well as to biological

embodiment, illness, and social practices of dying. Accordingly, this section begins with

an article by Nina Lykke, a queer feminist pioneer of environmental, multispecies, and

medical humanities in the Scandinavian context, who advocates a renewed attention

to Anthropocene “necropolitics”9 amidst global cancer epidemics. In her piece “Making

Live and Letting Die: Cancerous Bodies between Anthropocene Necropolitics and Chthu-

lucene Kinship,” Lykke seeks to reorient the environmental humanities analytics from

a merely critical approach of individuals fighting the war on cancer to a critical-

affirmative approach of a “we,” a planetary kinship of vulnerable bodies inhabiting “the

Chthulucene”10 through an ethics of affirmative difference.

Hugo Reinert, in his article “The Midwife and the Poet: Bioaccumulation and Retro-

active Shock,” follows in this northern suite with a triangulation of ethnographic stories

from a mining site in northern Norway. In his essay, Reinert attempts to make tangible

a particular Anthropocene affect, a shared and embodied feeling of retroactive shock

from experiences of differently distributed risks and harms of chemical exposure, colo-

nial racism, ethnic erasure, and environmental destruction.

In Sasha Litvintseva’s contribution to this collection, the media and cultural

scholar and filmmaker follows toxic afterlives of asbestos in a Canadian town whose

history and even its name are inseparable from the history of asbestos production. For

8. For ways toxic embodiment disturbs or aligns with multiple boundaries of sexes, generations, races,

geographies, nation-states, and species, see Agard-Jones, Body Burdens; Gaard, Critical Ecofeminisms; Nun,

“Toxic Encounters”; Murphy, “Alterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations”; Roberts, Messengers of Sex; Rob-

erts et al., “Toxic Bodies/Toxic Environments”; and Simmons, “Settler Atmospherics.”

9. Mbembe, “Necropolitics.”

10. Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene.”

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Litvintseva, asbestos is a fibrous mineral that operates outside in and inside out, attest-

ing to environed embodiment and embodied environments in the conceptual registers

of trans-corporeality and viscous porosity.11 Asbestos exhibits a weird and multi-sited

cultural history of its own, but more importantly, she asserts, it translates into an

understanding that there is no spatial or temporal “outside” in which to deposit toxic

materials. Following on this, Litvintseva argues that being an environed body also

means there is no “outside” to either vulnerability or responsibility.

The theme of “Outside Inside” continues in Adam Dickinson’s poetic intervention

with this particular title. Dickinson’s creative focus is on the proliferation of plastics

and petrochemicals, and on how they also constitute forms of socio-material and bio-

logical writing capable of altering human metabolisms. Starting from the measured lev-

els of phthalates in his own urine, the poem considers “metabolic poetics” of endocrine-

disrupting chemicals and links the personal to the global in environmental ethics.

The old feminist adage, the personal is political, gets another twist in Michael

Marder’s essay “Being Dumped.” In a fervor of field philosophical conceptions, plant

philosopher Marder digs where he stands in his post-phenomenological exposé on the

“ontological toxicity” of the dump of ideas, bodies, dreams, memes, and waste materials

that make the present place the age of the global dump.

Miriam Tola, a cultural media and gender scholar with a track record in cinema

journalism and documentary making, explores toxic embodiment and what might

emerge from the toxic ruins of modernity. She takes us to a former chemical-textile

plant in the Prenestino neighborhood of Rome, Italy, a postindustrial ruin and site of

labor exploitation, toxicity, and environmental struggle since the 1920s, in her article

“The Archive and the Lake. Labor, Toxicity, and the Making of Cosmopolitical Commons

in Rome, Italy.” Drawing on archives from the area, she examines toxic memories and

environmental destruction and finds historical workers’ resistance seeding into con-

temporary underground activism for the human and nonhuman commons of this

“rebel lake” area and into antiproprietary cosmopolitics.

This special section on toxic embodiment aims to pick up recent injunctions to ex-

plore differing forms of multispecies exposure, as originating in the various tap-ins to

environmental humanities.12 Feminist scholar and trans cinema activist Wibke Straube

traces ticks, trans bodies, and others of the kind Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van

Dooren call “unloved others”13 through close readings of video art, blog posts, and mov-

ies on the livability of trans embodiment. Cultural approaches to the transgender body

as human Other and the tick body as an animal Other, come together here to explore

toxicity as a “feminist figuration”14 for unexpected alliances and an ethical engagement

11. For trans-corporeality, see Alaimo, Bodily Natures; for viscous porosity, see Tuana, “Viscous Porosity.”

12. Alaimo, Exposed; Chen, Animacies; DeSilvey, Curated Decay; Oppermann, “Toxic Bodies and Alien

Agencies”; van Dooren, Flight Ways.

13. Rose and van Dooren, “Unloved Others.”

14. Haraway, “Manifesto for Cyborgs”; Haraway, “Introduction.”

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with the world that exceeds common practices of pathologization. The very idea of tox-

icity, and that it must be purged from our lives (detoxed) in order to return to some

imagined pristine or pure state of being, points to a whole underbelly of a question:

How are we all complicit in who and what gets to count as toxic and in toxic existence

at large, with our consumerist lifestyles and dependency on intoxications of all kinds?

This is where Michael Marder’s essay crosses over with Wibke Straube’s transfeminist

exposé. As Mel Y. Chen phrased it, how might the intimacies of toxicity also summon

“queer loves?”15 Indeed, experimenting with the triangulation between our selfhood’s

toxic embodiment, between word and world, is itself a form of exposure, demanding

new conceptualizations, ways of writing, and lines of flight. This work, rather than call-

ing for detoxification and purity, is a work of attending to the wounds of the world,16

and calling for collective and individual forms of healing and caring for human and

more-than-human communities.

We discovered as editors that exploring the theme of toxic embodiment entails

some difficult interdisciplinary or even postdisciplinary conversations, engaging envi-

ronmental historians, queer feminist philosophers, transgender studies scholars, scien-

tists, eco-cultural studies and science studies people, literary and eco-poetic research-

ers, and academic politics of location.17 As the editors of this special section, we are so

grateful to have made the acquaintance with what seems like a surge in research inter-

est in diversifying environmental humanities, already a pluripotent field of many up-

stream sources in environmental justice, queer and trans theory, multispecies humani-

ties, science, and popular imagination.

OLGA CIELEME ̨CKA is a feminist researcher and philosopher and a postdoctoral fellow at the

Turku Institute for Advanced Studies at University of Turku in Finland. She gained her PhD from

Warsaw University in Poland and did her postdoctoral fellowship in an environmental humanities

program, The Seed Box, at Linköping University in Sweden. Her research brings contemporary

philosophy and feminist and queer approaches to our thinking about environmental change. In

her most recent research projects, Cieleme ̨cka explores political and cultural meanings of plants.

CECILIA ÅSBERG, is guest professor in science and technology studies with a focus on gender

and environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, and full professor/chair of

gender, nature, culture at Linköping University. She is also the Director of the Posthumanities

Hub (www.posthumanities.net).

Acknowledgment

We would like to thank all scholars who submitted papers and shared their research, including taking

the risks this entails, and we express our gratitude to all the reviewers who generously gave their

time and commitment. We would like to especially extend our heartfelt thanks to the editors of

15. Chen, Animacies, 207–11.

16. Sandilands, “Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies.”

17. Rich, “Notes towards a Politics of Location.”

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Environmental Humanities, Thom van Dooren and Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, and to the amazing team of

associate editors Marco Armiero, Julie Doyle, David Farrier, Jamie Lorimer, Salma Monani, and Astrida

Neimanis, who helped us make this section come to fruition. Very special thanks to our editorial

assistant, Vera Weetzel, also a researcher of the Posthumanities Hub. The work was also done under

the auspices of the Swedish research program, the Seed Box, and its subtheme Toxic Embodiment.

Our thanks, finally, go to loved ones, companions, and colleagues of the research group the Posthu-

manities Hub, who supported us with solidarity in shifty times of relocation, transformation, and re-

energization.

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