Introduction

Abstract

T his special section on toxic embodiment examines variously situated bodies, landand 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, accompanied by iconic photographs of dead killer whales washed ashore. Infertile orcas with extreme levels of PCB (polychlorinated biphenyl) in their system bring to the environmental social imaginary the toxic kinship of predators and other species, including humans, threatened by extinction. The cumulative exposure to endocrine disruptors, neurotoxins, asthmagens, carcinogens, and mutagens comes with everyday life today, making us all toxic bodies. In our present situation, the theme of toxic embodiment embraces 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 nature, and nature, polluted as it may be, is in us. Terms like bio-burden or bioaccumulation 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.

For sled dogs and women: Hormonal contraception and animacy hierarchies in Danish/Greenlandic Depo-Provera debates

“…According to Danish newspapers, Petersson asserted on Greenlandic radio that ‘the birth control injection should not be used in a civilised country on a healthy population’ (Sjællands Tidende, 1988b: 3). Environmental humanities scholars have noted that advocacy for chemical detoxification does not only work to highlight the harms of pollution but also often to render specific bodies and geographies pathological (Ah-King and Hayward, 2013; Cielemęcka and Åsberg, 2019; Di Chiro, 2010; Lamoreaux, 2021; Murphy, 2017; Nunn, 2018). Similarly, in these arrangements about who should or should not be recipients of ‘The Shot’, Depo-Provera was presented as a marker of non-normality, non-civilisation, and Otherness.…”

“…In answering these questions, we rely on feminist and environmental humanities scholarship attending to the cultural as well as material circulation of anthropogenic chemical substances to explore how syringes of synthetic progesterone were attributed meaning, value, and affective force, working not only to disturb menstrual cycles in humans – though not exclusively – but also to re-establish colonial power hierarchies in Greenland in a period understood to be ‘post-colonial’, since Danish colonial rule in Greenland officially ended in 1953. Toxic imaginaries and trans-corporeal movements often affect, as environmental humanities scholars have theorised, poor, racialised, and queer communities differently and unequally (Alaimo, 2010; Cielemęcka and Åsberg, 2019; Di Chiro, 2010; Murphy, 2017; Nunn, 2018). Despite feminist research on birth control injections being critically attentive towards the global circulation and cross-border, cross-class movements of synthetic progesterone that unequally expose racialised and socially marginalised bodies to side-effects and eugenic population control, this work has not so far been connected to recent efforts to interrogate toxic relationalities.…”

Transcorporeal Witnessing: Re-Figuring Toxic Entanglements Through the Arts

“…Modernity has produced shell-shocking webs and permeations of disease and destruction. In this regard, we might invoke the term toxic embodiment (Cielemęcka & Asberg, 2019) to acknowledge not only pollutant-filled human and nonhuman bodies but also discourses exploitative of nonhuman and more-than-human life-worlds. Such discourses can activate educational reflection, resistance, and innovation (Weedon, 1987).…”

Pathogenic proliferations: Salmon aquaculture, industrial viruses, and toxic geographies of settler-colonialism

“…While the toxic effects of PRV might be most clearly visible at the scale of fish bodies and blood cells, toxicity also transcends individual bodies, particular places, or specific moments in time (e.g. Cielemęcka and Åsberg, 2019; Liboiron et al, 2018; Sandlos and Keeling, 2016). Socioeconomic, political, and environmental injustices and the forms of toxicity they produce are at once deeply place-based yet fundamentally structural.…”