Toxic Sexual Politics: Toxicology, Environmental Poisons, and Queer Feminist Futures

Toxic Sexual Politics shows how the founding fathers of US toxicology were ideologically aligned with the chemical industry and thus invented a science that could “make chemicals safe” as opposed to one that could adequately protect planetary health from toxicants’ impossible-to-measure hazards. While many toxicologists today are critical of the chemical industry’s “economic poisons,” they continue to rely on the highly limited tools of toxicology for accurate measures of toxicity. Offering a lively blend of archival and ethnographic data, Packer focuses on the controversial field of endocrine-disrupting chemicals and demonstrates how toxicology’s deeply flawed precepts continue to dominate the discipline. Rather than ask whether a toxicant should be made, and rather than learn about the political economy of a given chemical corporation’s toxic products or the social conditions surrounding their deployment, toxicologists are taught merely to measure, using the woefully—perhaps even intentionally so—inadequate measuring tools of a science developed by chemical industry enthusiasts. Unlike previous critiques of chemical industry and narratives of environmental pollution, Toxic Sexual Politics refuses to take the science at face value. By focusing on the heterosexist, racist, and ableist biases implicitly, if not explicitly, reinforced by the science, Packer powerfully argues that toxicology reproduces the very same masculinist and white supremacist ideologies that helped to create environmental injustices in the first place. A study of toxicants inspired instead by queer ecology, feminist biology, and reproductive justice has a much greater chance of reining in chemical power than the deeply political, dominant science of poisons.