Testimonial Justice in Toxic Life Narrative
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Poisoned Subjects: Testimonial Justice in Toxic Life Narrative by Emily C. Johnston A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English and Women’s Studies) in the University of Michigan 2015 Doctoral Committee: Professor Sidonie A. Smith, Chair Associate Professor Maria E. Cotera Professor Petra Kuppers Assistant Professor Melanie R. Yergeau © Emily C. Johnston 2015 Acknowledgements It takes a village to raise a dissertation, and mine is no exception. The many people who supported me as family, friends, colleagues, readers, and mentors made this project possible. Of course, any errors remain my own. The first person I want to thank every morning when I wake up and at the end of every day is my husband, Neil. I am grateful for the support of my wonderful parents, especially my mom, who celebrates with me even the smallest of accomplishments, and Dee, who first helped me imagine an academic career and keeps me re-imagining it. The greatest pleasure of graduate school has been the opportunity to work alongside some of the smartest, bravest, and kindest people I know. I am particularly grateful to Amrita, who always says the truest thing; to Julia, for her gentle insights; to Kevin, for all the days he helped me sit and write and laugh while doing it; to Brady and Aaron, who made living and working in Ann Arbor a joy; and to Cass, who is success. I appreciate the thoughtful feedback I have received from audiences at the Cultural Studies Association Conference and the Reconceptualizing Narrative Conference at Rice University, Dontella Izzo and the members of my seminar group at the Futures of American Studies Institute, anonymous readers, members of my dissertation writing group, the Disability Studies Workshop at the University of Michigan, Cass Adair, Jenna Goldsmith, and Danielle Adelman. Thanks to Beth Strickland at the University of Michigan Libraries for her assistance. ii I have been lucky enough to find many generous mentors in graduate school. Warm and wonderful thanks to Maria Cotera, Petra Kuppers, and Melanie Yergeau for taking on me and my project and giving generously of their limited time and vast talents. The late Patsy Yaeger was integral to my thinking during the early stages of this project; her insight, imagination, and humor are sorely missed. Adela Pinch and Scotti Parrish have been important interlocutors at key moments in the dissertation process. Meg Sweeney has absolutely saved me with her ferocious kindness. My chair extraordinaire Sid Smith has chastised me more than once for burying the most important point in the middle of a paragraph, and I hope by now I have learned my lesson. I simply could not have done it all without your support. I thank you. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii List of Figures v Abstract vi Introduction: Poisoned Subjects in the Risk Society 1 Chapter 1. Narratives of Diethylstilbestrol Exposure 38 2. Frames of Disability in Multiple Chemical Sensitivity Testimony 92 3. Toxic Life Narrative in the Alternative Food Movement 128 4. Rethinking Environmental Chemicals Through Speculative Auto/biography 181 Coda: Eco-Normativity and Epistemic Justice 213 Works Cited 219 iv List of Figures 1. DES daughter Gaylene Fraser with husband, Rob, and daughter, Alexandra 70 2. DES daughter Judith Helfand, with mother, Florence Helfand 71 3. DES son Bill Kenny with mother, Mary Kenny, and sister Kathleen Sanderson 72 4. Randy H. (b. 1950) Prescott, Arizona 102 5. Susan M. (b 1949), MCS and Disability Rights Activist Snowflake, Arizona 103 6. Martin L. (b. 1962) Tucson, Arizona 103 7. Jessica B. (b. 1940), Judith M. Prescott, Arizona 104 8. Home page view of POP! The First Male Pregnancy 190 v Abstract Since at least the publication of Lois Gibbs’s 1982 memoir about the toxic waste disaster in New York’s Love Canal community, anti-toxics social movements have relied on personal narrative as a crucial vehicle through which to advance their political agendas. As a result, acts of personal witness have been central to the body of knowledge ecocritics call “toxic discourse,” which names a set of recognizable topoi through which fears about toxic proliferation are represented in narrative. This dissertation asks how people exposed to environmental chemicals wield personal narrative to constitute themselves as poisoned subjects seeking recognition and redress for toxic injury. As they witness to the harms of toxic exposures, poisoned subjects confront gendered and ableist challenges to their authority as witnesses to embodied experiences of illness and disability. Confronting such testimonial injustice, poisoned subjects navigate unsteady relationships to normative forms of being and embodiment. “Poisoned Subjects” examines life narratives emerging from three anti-toxics embodied health movements: diethylstilbestrol narratives DES Daughter, Daughters at Risk, and DES Stories in chapter 1; multiple chemical sensitivity testimony collections The Dispossessed and Amputated Lives in chapter 2; and alternative food exposés The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Tomatoland in chapter 3. Across these successive chapters, the dissertation tracks an “ur” narrative of environmental chemical exposure in which autobiographical narrators draw on familiar tropes and story structures to make legible claims as subjects of toxic harm. The final chapter reads the digital art piece Male Pregnancy Project as a toxic life narrative in order to vi interrogate toxic discourse’s implicit messages about disability, reproduction, and justice. Reading Male Pregnancy Project’s interest in hormone-induced bodily changes back onto environmentalist concerns about endocrine-disrupting chemicals reveals toxic discourse as an inheritor of a long tradition of eugenic environmentalisms. Toxic discourse is invested in concepts of fitness and better breeding that negatively impact efforts toward testimonial and embodied justice for marginalized ecological others. “Poisoned Subjects” intervenes in the study of toxic discourse to consider relationships between tropes of toxicity and autobiographical forms. Drawing attention to the deep connection between environmental and testimonial justice, this dissertation demonstrates that personal witness is central to the ways environmental movements and subjects are imagined. In so doing, it challenges prevailing approaches to toxic discourse as congruent with environmental justice. While toxic discourse is a strategy that has helped some subjects achieve recognition and win political gains, personal narratives of environmental chemical exposure reinscribe interlocking norms of gender and ability. vii Introduction Poisoned Subjects in the Risk Society By writing stories about environmental change, we divide the causal relationships of an ecosystem with a rhetorical razor that defines included and excluded, relevant and irrelevant, empowered and disempowered. In the act of separating story from non-story, we wield the most powerful yet dangerous tool of the narrative form. It is a commonplace of modern literary theory that the very authority with which narrative presents its vision of reality is achieved by obscuring large portions of that reality. Narrative succeeds to the extent that it hides the discontinuities, ellipses, and contradictory experiences that would undermine the intended meaning of its story. Whatever its overt purpose, it cannot avoid a covert exercise of power: it inevitably sanctions some voices while silencing others. A powerful narrative reconstructs common sense to make the contingent seem determined and the artificial seem natural. -William Cronon1 The Love Canal story is about a thousand families who lived near the site of an abandoned toxic chemical waste dump. More important, it is a warning of what could happen in any American community…Love Canal is the story of how government tends to approach a problem, and of how we, ordinary citizens of the United States, can take control of our own lives by insisting that we be heard. -Lois Gibbs2 This is a story about stories. The stories people tell about lives shaped by chemicals in the environment; the repeated telling of those stories in the context of health social movements; and the stories that emerge as literary and cultural critics, social scientists, and historians make sense of those narratives across the shifting terrains of environmental activism and late capitalism. This is a story about a kind of subjecthood that emerged in the last third of the twentieth century. A subjecthood constituted alongside the mass infusion of human-made chemicals into “natural” 1 and built environments. A subjecthood organized around growing anxieties about the physical effects and cultural meanings of this toxic proliferation. “Poisoned Subjects: Testimonial Justice in Toxic Life Narrative” is a study of autobiographical representations in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century embodied health movements in the United States. Personal testimony, offered through a wide variety of forms of life narrative, illuminates how toxic anxieties and materialities help produce collective political identities and cultural understandings of the meaning of a life under late capitalism. I ask how people exposed to environmental chemicals wield forms of personal narrative to constitute themselves as poisoned subjects seeking recognition and redress for toxic illness or injury. Together, the chapters that follow probe relationships between ideologies of biological reproduction and economic