Troubling Figures: Endocrine Disruptors, Intersex Frogs, and the Logics of Environmental Science Logan Natalie O’Laughlin Duke University
[email protected] Abstract This essay examines the figure of the pesticide-exposed intersex frog, a canary in the coal mine for public endocrinological health. Through feminist science studies and critical discourse analysis, I explore the fields that bring this figure into being (endocrinology, toxicology, and pest science) and the colonial and racial logics that shape these fields. In so doing, I attend to the multiple nonhuman actors shaping this figure, including the pesky weeds and insects who prompt pesticides’ very existence, “male” frogs who function as test subjects, and systemic environmental racism that disproportionately exposes people of color to environmental toxicants. I encourage careful examination of galvanizing environmental figures like this toxic intersex frog and I offer a method to do so. Introduction “The second most commonly used pesticide [in the United States], atrazine,…led one of my frogs to develop a set of testes here, ovaries here, another testis, and more ovaries…which is NOT normal, even for amphibians,” chuckles Dr. Tyrone Hayes while gesturing to the image of a frog’s gonads in his 2010 TED Talk (Hayes & Chaffer, 2010; Figure 1). In his words, atrazine makes frogs “abnormal,” “gender-bending,” “homosexual,” and therefore “unsuccessful at mating” (Hayes et al., 2002; Hayes et al., 2003; Hayes & Chaffer, 2010). Other environmental scientists have studied the concerning effects of toxicants on frogs. For instance, O’Laughlin, Logan Natalie. (2020). Troubling figures: Endocrine disruptors, intersex frogs, and the logics of environmental science.