This article reviews interdisciplinary toxicity literature, building from Gerald E. Markowitz and David Rosner’s “deceit and denial” and Phil Brown’s “contested illnesses” to argue for a third, more critical analytic that I term “empire and empirics.” Deceit and denial pit corporate actors against antitoxins advocates, while contested illnesses highlight social movements. Empire and empirics center the role of imperialism in reproducing today’s unevenly distributed toxic exposures. I find this third path the most generative because the products and the production of science—toxicants and toxicology—are situated in their sociohistorical, politico-economic, ecological, and affective contexts. Revealing the imperialist logics embedded into dominant ontoepistemology also illuminates alternative, liberatory pathways toward more environmentally just futures. I close with examples of “undisciplined” action research, highlighting scholar-practitioners who study toxicity with care and in nonhierarchical collaboration. While undisciplining is challenging, its potential for realizing environmental justice far outweighs the difficulties of doing science differently.
In this article I think through Black feminism and queer theory to critically analyze toxicology. I focus on toxicology's conception of endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), a class of toxicants that can cause epigenetic changes leading to inheritable health issues. I suggest that Black feminist interventions are particularly necessary for the study of toxicants because multiply marginalized populations are disproportionately more exposed to EDCs. The structural preconditions that generate this uneven, racialized, and sexualized toxic body-burden threaten to turn cultural constructions of race and sex (epistemologies) into biological realities (ontologies). My discursive analysis of key scientific texts on toxicology, EDCs, and epigenetics underscores how Eurocentric biases and eugenic logics permeate and co-constitute biochemical matter. I further argue that these texts’ un/articulated norms regarding the human, sexual behavior, and evolutionary fitness undermine the usefulness of toxicological assessments for environmental justice. I close by urging scientist scholar-activists to reconceive the study of toxicants. A Black feminist approach to toxicity, I suggest, would not only situate chemical exposures in their sociopolitical contexts, but also radically revision what it means to be human.
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