Becoming with Toxicity: Chemical Epigenetics as “Racializing and Sexualizing Assemblage”

Abstract

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.

How scientists become experts—or don’t: Social organization of research and engagement in scientific advice in a toxicology laboratory

“…In the past two decades, though, toxicological research has developed outside this core of toxicological risk assessment practice. Biologists have appropriated the problem of toxicity, toxics, and mechanisms of contamination without necessarily fully entering the area of disciplinary toxicology and claiming the label of ‘toxicologist.’ Emerging biological facts such as endocrine disruption—not a discovery of toxicologists but of academic endocrinologists—have come to disrupt dose thinking, a core method and assumptions of the basic science of poisons (Packer, 2022). Knowledge produced about exposure to chemicals, either by emerging epigenetic research (Le Goff et al, 2022), or civic testing and measurement programs (Murphy, 2008), also arose and were marked as outside the increasingly demarcated core (and admittedly conservative) form of toxicology (Myers et al, 2009).…”