Athwart a Mercurial Ocean: Transnational and Transcorporeal Flows of Methylmercury

• In Event: Time-Scapes of Toxicity (1): Making Boundaries

Abstract

Humans have dumped “stuff” in oceans for a long time, and in a particularly concentrated way since the global north’s Industrial Revolution, the effects of which we now note as evidence of the Anthropocene – or the Anthropocean. Here I trace the enactment of a mercurial ocean through mercury as it is taken up and transported by atmospheric and oceanic currents from plumes produced in artisanal mines in Asia, and transformed into methylmercury as it engages with water and bacteria. It becomes an agent of trans-movement: it enters into the food chain and eventuates in the diets of certain populations, especially those in Nordic countries, with toxic effects into future generations. This, I argue, produces a particular understanding of the trans-ocean, one with temporal and spatial multiplicity that distinctively rearranges the global north-south. For instance, the flow of mercury is gendered and racialized with women workers in Indonesia being primarily affected while women in the north are the recipients of methylmercury in the form of toxic fish.

I engage with scientific research on mercury flows and methylmercury biogeochemical cycling, and draw on the work of Annemarie Mol on the body multiple, feminist STS research into epigenetics (Mansfield, Guthman, Landecker), and feminist environmental posthumanism (Alaimo, Neimanis). My argument seeks to disturb the singular and othered ocean in order to make way for the ocean multiple – a conception of the different forms of the oceanic produced through the athwart or trans admixtures of the more-than-human (Helmreich, Probyn).

Author

• Elspeth Probyn, Gender & Cultural Studies, University of Sydney