A Queer Critical Race Feminist Take On Reproductive Toxicity

• In Event: Toxic Subjects: Historical, Legal, Occupational, and Medical Perspectives - II

Abstract

This paper traces the history of heteronormativity within toxicology science and explores the embodied consequences of such sex/gender biases in terms of reproductive toxicity, broadly conceived.

I conduct queer critical race feminist content analysis across all nine editions of the core U.S. toxicology textbook: Casarett & Doull’s Toxicology: The Basic Science of Poisons (1975/2019). My systematic reading finds the following three persistent assumptions: 1. toxins are necessary evils, 2. the socio-political production of toxins is outside the scope of scientific inquiry, 3. the male/female sex binary and heterosexual pairing is indisputably clear and always true and therefore the guiding framework for assessing reproductive and endocrine-disrupting toxicity. I argue that this textbook’s increasingly anxious attempts at measuring and monitoring unruly toxins not only misses—-and thus absolves corporate-state responsibility for-—the political economy of synthetic chemical manufacture and deployment, but also that the scientist-authors’ uncritical use of male/female sexual activity to assess transgenerational toxicity occludes other, perhaps more informative, and certainly more politicized, indicators of danger or distress.

I close with a call for socially-embedded science pedagogy. What if toxicology textbooks were to consider how reproductive toxicity bears distinctly different registers in specific spatial-historical contexts (Hartman 2016; Luna and Luker 2013; Sasser 2014). Who wants whom to reproduce, and for what purposes? By contrast, who is chemically, socially, and/or politically prevented from reproducing, and by whom? How might explicit study of toxicology science's “racializing and sexualizing assemblages” (Weheliye 2014) produce better accounts of the world as well as more livable lives?

Author

• Melina Packer, University of California, Berkeley