Chapter 7. Polluted Politics? Confronting Toxic Discourse, Sex Panic and Eco-Normativity by Giovanna Di Chiro
“Stereotypes and lies lodge in our bodies as surely as bullets. They live and fester there, stealing the body.”—Eli Clare
Queer ecology as defined by Mortimer-Sandilands (2005, 24) “both about seeing beauty in the wounds of the world and taking responsibility to care for the world as it is”. (200)
Environmental justice constructs an eco-politics that defines the environment as our communities: the places where ‘we live, work, play, and learn’ (200). Environmental justice activists embrace inhabited/built places---cities, villages, reservations, agricultural fields, workplaces, poor and low-income neighborhoods next to hazardous industrial facilities as environments worthy of recognition and protection (Di Chiro 1996)
There has been rising environmental anxiety that surrounds cultural fears of exposure to chemical and endocrine-disrupting toxins especially as it relates to the troubling and destabilizing of normal/natural gendered bodies of humans and other animal species aka the “chemical castration” or the “feminization of nature” (Cadbury 1998; Hayes 2002)--rising fears that we are “swimming in a sea of estrogen” (Raloff 1994b, 56; Sumpter and Jobling 1995 173) as a consequence of rising levels of estrogenic, synthetic chemical compounds emitted into our water, air and food known as estrogenic pollution (ova-pollution). (201)
Pop-science warning about the ‘instability of maleness’—warns that the rising incidences of male-to-female gender shifts and intersex conditions observed in the ‘lower’ species of animals, such as frogs, fish, and salamanders, represent the newest ‘canaries in the coalmine’ portending an uncertain fate for human maleness and for the future of ‘normal’ sexual reproduction (Robert 2003) (201) also anti-toxins discourse has concerns about estrogenic chemical toxins disrupting/preventing/disturbing ‘normal’ prenatal physiological development and natural reproductive processes, leading to rising cases of infertility and producing disabled, defective, and even monstrous bodies (201)…
What can develop is a “sex panic” that resuscitates familiar heterosexist, queerphobic, and eugenics arguments classifying some bodies as not normal: mistakes, perversions, burdens (I would add ‘freaks’)…under the guise of laudable goal/progressive goals, a certain type of anti-toxics environmentalism mobilizes knowledge/power of normalcy and normativity and reinforces compulsory social-environmental order based on a dominant regime of what and who are constructed as normal and natural (Davis 1995; Garland-Thompson 1997; McRuer 2006).
Disability becomes an environmental problem and lgbtq people become disabled—the unintended consequences of a contaminated and impure environment, unjustly impaired by chemical trespass. (202) The true scope of the mortality and morbidity of POPs (persistent organic pollutants) becomes distorted by alarmist focus. This fixation ends up de-emphasizing and worse--naturalizing and normalizing other serious health problems associated with POPs that are on the rise: breast, ovarian, prostate and testicular cancers, neurological and neurobehavioral problems, immune system breakdown, heart disease, diabetes and obesity (202).
There is good reason for alarm concerning the continued use and accumulation of toxic chemicals that are wreaking havoc on the health and reproductive possibilities of the living world. Our cumulative exposures to endocrine disruptors, carcinogens, neurotoxins, asthmagens, and mutagens in our normal, everyday lives from our daily contact with plastic water bottles, shampoos, and kitchen cleaners to insect repellents, food preservatives, and factory farmed meats, among others, are most certainly putting at risk the health of our own bodies and our earth. (210) But where should the critical attention lie?
The hyperfocus on the world turning into hermaphrodites participates in a sexual titillation strategy summoning the familiar ‘crimes against’ nature’ credo and inviting culturally sanctioned homophobia while at the same time sidelining and naturalizing ‘normal’ environmental diseases such as cancer (211).
Environmental theory and politics in the US have historically mobilized ideas of the normal, to determine which bodies and environments/landscapes embody the distinctly American values of productive work, rugged individualism, masculinity, independence, potency, and moral virtue upon which environmental advocacy movements should be based (Haraway 1989; Cronon 1991). Critical histories of U.S. environmentalism have revealed the capitalist, patriarchal, colonialist, heteronormative, eugenicist, and ableist histories underlying its “progressive” exterior (Boag 2003; Darnovky 1992; Evans 2002; Gaard 2004; Jaquette 2005; Sutter 2001).
Eco-normativity (or eco[hetero]normativity) appear in alarmist discourse in the anti-toxins arm of the environmental movement. Their alarm about contaminants effect on sex/gender appeals to preexisting cultural norms of gender balance, normal sexual reproduction and the balance of nature. The use of “anti-normal” “anti-natural” in antitoxins discourse is highly questionable and risks reinforcing the dominant social and economic order (the forces actually responsible for environmental destruction and toxic contamination of all our bodies and environments) by naturalizing the multiple injustices that shore it up”…and thus creates what the author terms, polluted politics.
