Women constitute a disproportionate 80 percent of people diagnosed with environmental illness (EI), a contentious condition in which patients react adversely to everyday chemicals in the environment at levels politically conceived to be ‘safe’. Whilst the diverse range of somatic symptoms constitutes a biomedical anomaly, in this paper I present an alternative means of conceiving environmentally ill bodies. Women (and environmental health practitioners at the Environmental Health Centre, Nova Scotia) have begun to view their bodies as complex systems that have been nudged into a state of ‘corporeal chaos’, in which minute quantities of chemicals trigger disproportionate somatic symptoms. This chaos extends into ‘corporeal space’[Moss and Dyck (1999a)] as the diagnosis of environmental illness is experienced simultaneously through both material and discursive bodies. This diagnosis also carries with it a means to mitigate corporeal chaos through a series of body‐ and environment‐based modifications that replace risky bodies with ‘safe space’. As a discursive construct, safe space is associated with an absence of chemicals, and in order to mitigate chaos, should ideally be stable, predictable, controllable and communicative. I finalise this paper with some examples of body modifications and illustrate how safe space materialises in the home environment.

The 'clean green image '

Nature is widely acknowledged to be a fluid, contested, material-semiotic construction, historically and spatially grounded. This is certainly the case for New Zealand, where a number of constructions of nature have been mobilized as a means to make judgements over the viability of particular biotechnologies that have entered into public debate. In this paper, we utilize Mikhail Bakhtin's space-time matrix, the chronotope, to explore a series of complementary nature-narratives that have been mobilized as a moral basis for making judgments over the acceptability of a series of exemplars of novel biotechnologies that were presented to participants in eleven national focus groups. We argue that it is the specific space-time manipulations that characterize these sometimes overlapping narrative constructions that are used to justify reactions to novel biotechnologies.

Newborn metabolic screening is the most widespread application of screening technology and provides the most comprehensive application of genetics in health services, where the Guthrie blood spot cards allow screening for metabolic diseases in close to 100 % of all newborn babies. Despite over 40 years of use and significant benefits to well in excess of 100,000 children worldwide, there is remarkably little consensus in what conditions should be screened for and response to new advances in medicine relating to programme expansion. In this article, the international criteria for newborn metabolic screening are considered, and we propose that these criteria are poorly developed in relation to the baby, its family and society as a whole. Additionally, the ethical issues that should inform the application of screening criteria are often not developed to a level where a consensus might easily be achieved. We also consider that when family interests are factored in to the decision-making process, they have a significant influence in determining the list of diseases in the panel, with countries or states incorporating family and societal values being the most responsive. Based on our analysis, we propose that decision criteria for metabolic screening in the newborn period should be adapted to specifically include parent and family interests, community values, patients’ rights, duties of government and healthcare providers, and ethical arguments for action in the face of uncertainty.

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