Evanescent Imaginaries: Women's Bodies and Household Smoke in Southern Vietnam

• In Event: The Body as Environmental Sensor - II

Abstract

This paper addresses the ways smoke, specifically smoke produced from burning biomass fuels, is experienced and embodied by women in Vietnam. Discursively produced by public health actors as household air pollution, and by climate scientists as a source of black carbon, this same smoke is imagined by household cooks to be a source of flavor for traditional meals, a pest deterrent, and a “natural” way that bodies and their environments intermingle every day. At the same time, the increasing dissemination of scientific discourses about smoke and its dangers is shifting how women cooks understand smoke in relation to their households, kitchens, and bodies. This paper explores these shifts through interviews with women in a peri-urban community in southern Vietnam. It traces the evanescent circuits of biomass smoke, centering women’s bodies as sites for negotiating contestations over scientific and embodied knowledge.

Author

• Jade Sasser, University of California, Riverside