Unequal Hormonal Disruptions and Systemic Racisms: The Environmental Injustice of Beauty

• In Event: Hormones on the Move: Transnational Entanglements in the Everyday - II

Abstract

Hormone disrupting chemicals, and their presence in everyday products, has been critical to shifting debates about chemical regulatory science. The toxicological paradigm does not effectively incorporate considerations of low-dose/non-monotonic exposures, and this quandary has dominated debates over endocrine disrupting chemicals or consumer products containing hormone disrupting chemicals. Yet, there has been little attention to the social and environmental (in)justice landscapes of consumer product marketing, sales, and use, and within this, notably little consideration as to how racial injustice is produced and reproduced across geography, space, and circuits of production of consumer products with hormones on the move. This submission extends our work on the environmental injustice of beauty that called attention for clinicians to consider beauty product use in understanding reproductive health disparities may be linked with beauty product use. Here, we consider the circuits of (re)production that enables hormone disrupting chemicals to thrive in international markets towards building critical environmental justice and critical ecofeminist approaches into constructions of exposure-health disparities paradigms.

Author

• Bhavna Shamasunder, Occidental College