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Toxic Sexual Politics

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Melina Packer discusses the field of toxicology from a feminist and antiracist perspective

Image courtesy of interviewee. August 20, 2024

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This video is a transcript from an interview discussing Melina's book on toxic sexual politics, published by NYU Press. In the conversation, Melina explains her motivations for writing the book, which stem from both personal experiences and her academic training. She highlights the issues surrounding toxic exposure faced by marginalized farm workers in California, particularly due to agricultural pesticides, and relates this to her family's history with chemical exposure.

Melina critiques the field of toxicology, arguing that it is rooted in colonial, patriarchal, and racist ideologies that continue to influence its methods and outcomes. She emphasizes the need for a feminist critique of toxicology and calls for scientists to confront the harmful histories within their disciplines. She discusses her research methodology, which involved qualitative methods, such as interviews and ethnographic observations within toxical classrooms.

The conversation also covers the historical ties between toxicology and the chemical industry, noting that early toxicologists were aligned with corporate interests and focused on making toxic substances safe for economic purposes rather than protecting public health. Melina argues that the political and structural biases within toxicology must be acknowledged to improve the discipline’s approach to environmental justice.

Further, Melina advocates for the incorporation of Black feminist and queer theories to analyze toxicology critically, suggesting that these perspectives can provide better insights into the impacts of toxicants on communities. She concludes by emphasizing the importance of collaboration between critical theorists and practicing toxicologists to create a more equitable and justice-oriented understanding of toxicology and public health. Overall, her hope is for readers to recognize and address the underlying political influences in scientific fields to produce better-informed policies and practices.

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My motivations were both intellectual

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and personal, academic

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and activist, which is the case for all researchers.

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Those scientists are taught to disguise

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or deny their personal motivations

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and politics, which is a contention I'll come back to,

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but intellectually, in academically speaking,

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I had started out in food systems

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and food justice research

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as a master's in public policy student at Brown University,

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which is in New England.

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So I moved to Northern California for my PhD,

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and of course encountered a vastly different landscape

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of food justice issues, not only

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because of the scale of industrial agriculture on the west

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coast, but also

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because of the dramatically different

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context for farm workers.

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So farm workers in California, most

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of whom are impoverished migrants from Central America,

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are exposed to a massive amount of toxic pesticides,

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chemicals, which cause all manner of serious health issues,

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including for the workers, children,

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and future grandchildren.

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And yet this uneven, racialized

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and sexualized exposure is perfectly legal

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and of course quite profitable for big chem and big ag.

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Now, as a PhD student at uc, Berkeley,

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I was also receiving training in feminist science studies,

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which excavates the cultural politics

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and prejudices embedded into all sciences from

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astrophysics to zoology.

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So it started to make more

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and more sense to me to conduct a feminist critique

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of the scientific discipline of toxicology.

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There's ample excellent research on the corruption

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and racism of chemical corporations and chemical regulators,

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but only a small handful

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of researchers had interrogated the science of toxicants

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and even fewer from critical feminist perspectives.

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How I wondered could toxicology itself be contributing

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to this enormous environmental injustice?

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I was also motivated by my personal history,

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my father's parents, Eastern European Jews,

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they narrowly escaped Hitler's gas chambers

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and the chemical weaponry of World War ii.

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They immigrated to the US

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and lived out a comfortable middle class life,

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raised a family of four children

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and eventually passed of old age well into their nineties.

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My mother's parents, by contrast, descendants

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of Irish Catholic

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and Scottish Protestant settlers died very suddenly

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and far too early from cancer at the young age of 66

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because of exposure to chemical weaponry here in the us.

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But by the mid 20th century,

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that chemical weaponry had been reformulated

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as agricultural pesticides.

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My maternal grandparents lived

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and worked in central California, not as farm workers,

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but as public school teachers.

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And every day they wiped pesticide residues off their car

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windshield before driving to work,

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and every day they drank the well water from their property,

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a house tucked between vast grape

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and peach orchards in the Central Valley.

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So there was no question, according to their oncologist,

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that their sudden diagnoses

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and deaths were from that daily exposure to pesticides.

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And the irony of it all is

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that my grandfather taught chemistry.

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So I wrote this book because I want disciplines like

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chemistry, like toxicology, like agricultural extension

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to be taught and practiced differently.

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I want scientists to learn to reckon with the violent

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and racist histories of their disciplines

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and refuse to carry on business as usual.

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I conducted close textual analysis of toxicology textbooks

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and other scientific publications alongside ethnographic

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observations of toxicology classrooms, conferences,

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and laboratories over a period of about two years.

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And I also interviewed a range of toxicology practitioners

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and environmental health advocates.

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33 in total who spanned the political

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and occupational spectrum.

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Best toxicology was founded as its own academic

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and scientific discipline

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as distinct from biochemistry or pharmacology.

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In the mid to late 1950s, the first Society

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of Toxicology meeting took place somewhere around 1960,

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and its earliest practitioners

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who I call the founding fathers were explicitly aligned

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with chemical industry and the military industrial complex.

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They unabashedly advocated for the development

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and dissemination of what used

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to be called economic poisons.

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These are hazardous substances that are extremely toxic,

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but nevertheless necessary for capitalistic growth

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and US empire, including of course,

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chemical weapons and pesticides.

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Now, naturally, the founding fathers

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of toxicology didn't describe their political allegiances

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with the same terms I'm using.

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They waxed poetic about better living through chemistry,

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which was DuPont Corporations tagline

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and serving industry which serves mankind.

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That was Monsanto's old motto, declaring

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that toxicants were only potentially dangerous

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and vastly improved life.

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And in any case, they're inevitable.

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So toxicologists are now here

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to make sure these newly synthesized substances

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are used correctly.

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In other words, toxicology was designed

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to make chemicals safe to rationalize the manufacturer

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and deployment of toxicants not to protect factory

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and farm workers or public

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and environmental health more broadly.

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And when I took a deep dive into toxicological methods,

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for example, I was shocked.

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I mean basic toxic exposure experiments, the very foundation

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of the discipline were so crude, so clearly inadequate,

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so profoundly limited by an excess of vague predictions

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and uncertainties and statistical probabilities

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and dependent upon a given

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Toxicologist intuition.

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I mean, they literally use that word.

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And toxicologists are the first

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to admit their discipline is rife with uncertainty.

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As one of my interviewees put it,

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and he was one of the industry friendly toxicologists I

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talked to, toxicology is like forecasting the weather.

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But early toxicologists had the arrogance

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and the entitlement being the white moneyed patriarchs

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that they were to assert that their methods

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of prediction could be trusted to both keep people

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and environments safe

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and keep the gears of capitalist production well greased

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and grinding away contemporary toxicologists are not nearly

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as enamored with economic poisons as toxicologists

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of the 1970s were though

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that tendency hasn't gone away entirely

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because of course, decades of toxic disasters

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and environmental health crises have proven

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that toxicology is not actually making chemicals safe

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nor protecting the planet from toxic exposure.

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I mean, the metric tonnage

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of toxicants deployed worldwide on an annual basis

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or daily for that matter, is beyond human conception.

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I mean, you can't wrap your head around these figures.

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And the data that exists don't even track all

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of toxicant production.

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Chemical corporations in the US are not required

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to disclose everything in terms of production volume.

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And the state of US chemical regulation

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is a whole other debacle.

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And there are other scholars

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who have written good books on that mess.

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What I found in terms of the science of toxicology itself,

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and this is one of the core arguments of the book, is

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that the racist, sexist, classist eugenicist ideologies

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of us toxicology founding fathers are so deeply embedded

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into the disciplines, methods

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and underlying assumptions

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that even well-intentioned toxicologists today working

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towards environmental health

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and justice goals may be reinforcing the very same

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prejudices that produced uneven

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toxic exposure in the first place.

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So this aligns with what you know, black feminist theorists

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and poet Audrey Lorde, famous observation

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that the master's tools will not dismantle the master's

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house more than any other flavor of feminism, if you will.

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Black feminism in general taught me that context matters.

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History matters. Racism and sexism are not simply individual

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or even just intersectional,

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but structural structuring, right?

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So this means that a toxicologist can identify

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as anti-racist and still be conducting racist toxicology.

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And black feminist science studies meanwhile brings these

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critical approaches to scientific disciplines in particular

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illuminating that who is doing science matters, not simply

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because it's important to have a greater diversity

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of scientists, which I believe it is, but also

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because we need a greater diversity

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of scientific lenses and frames.

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But it's not so much who is producing scientific knowledge

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as what counts as scientific knowledge.

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That's going to determine who and where

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and what is adversely affected by scientific rationales

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and their policy applications.

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And perhaps more than any other critical theory queer theory

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taught me to question the so-called normal play

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with the status quo complicate notions of what's natural.

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I can illustrate with one

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of the examples I focus on in the book.

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Endocrine disrupting chemicals

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or EDCs are a particular type of toxicant

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that can cause multi-generational adverse health outcomes.

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Many pesticides are endocrine disrupting,

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which is why I mentioned earlier that even farm workers,

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future grandchildren may be harmed by the toxic pesticides.

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Farm workers are overexposed to EDC exposure has been linked

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to a wide spectrum of serious health issues,

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including cancer, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's,

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but for reasons having to do with heteronormativity

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and homophobia as well as white supremacist

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and ableist preoccupations with purity.

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The main focus of EDC research reporting

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and advocacy has been their effects on reproduction

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and what's called sexual behavior.

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So you've probably heard stories about chemicals in the

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water making frogs gay and I collaborated with a wildlife

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and evolutionary biologist, max Lambert, who taught me

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that frogs actually have queer sex all the time regardless

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of their exposure to toxic chemicals.

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And also that frogs

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or tadpoles technically change sex all the time,

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again irrespective of their exposure to toxic chemicals,

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which is why biologists might find a frog

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with egg cells in their testes, for example.

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And it turns out that these so-called intersex frogs with

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let's say ambiguous

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or unexpected genitalia can still successfully

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mate and reproduce.

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But toxicologists are taught

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that queer frog sex is a harmful outcome

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of exposure to EDCs.

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A practice of toxicology informed

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by queer theory would question the assumption

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that same sex sexual behavior is somehow abnormal

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or unnatural, or a sign that harm has been done.

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And does this reframing mean we shouldn't be alarmed about

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the ubiquity of EDCs in our environments?

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Absolutely not. Of course we should.

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But stigmatizing queerness

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and disability for that matter, is not the way forward.

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We need to talk about chemical corporations unchecked power

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to pollute the planet.

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So a practice of toxicology informed by black feminism.

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To return to that piece of your question would ask,

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you know, which specific corporation is profiting from a

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given toxicant enabled

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by which specific government regulations,

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which specific communities are overexposed to it?

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Black feminist and queer analyses of toxicology,

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in other words, include historical contexts

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and social asymmetries, not just the biochemical mechanisms

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of an isolated substance and always question the status quo.

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I'm not saying that toxicology is completely useless,

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but I think we need to do a much better job practicing

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and teaching toxicology.

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And I think toxicologists need to get explicitly

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or more honestly political, and I hope readers, scientists,

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and non-scientists alike, except more generally

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that acknowledging the politics

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of science doesn't make it any less influential.

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In fact, and this is a central tenet

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of feminist science studies,

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acknowledging the personal biases

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and political motivations running behind

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and through scientific fields

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and findings only strengthen science.

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'cause we're taking a much more comprehensive approach.

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We're illuminating omissions,

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we're broadening our perspectives.

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We're asking different questions.

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As feminist molecular biologists, delina, Roy puts it,

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and as historians tend to say, the best way not

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to repeat history is to study it right And critically.

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So I would add, because the victor's write history,

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the toxicologist own history

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of their discipline was significantly different

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from my queer feminist analysis.

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A truly feminist practice

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of toxicology cannot include what's become the completely

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normalized torture and exploitation of the lives

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and bodies of literally billions of animals,

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especially not in the name of environmental justice.

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And the more I learned about how toxicologists use animals,

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including the assumptions they make about animal behavior

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in order to gauge whether a toxicant has harmed the animal,

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the more I realized that animal behavior science too,

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is heavily burdened with racist, sexist, capitalist,

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and ableist baggage.

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Now, for instance, and this is something I raise in toxic

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sexual politics, animal behavior scientists,

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if not biologists more broadly, largely believe

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that the core purpose

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of an animal's existence is reproduction.

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Animals only exist to reproduce

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and pass on their genes according

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to mainstream dominant biology.

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If you have this belief as an animal behavior scientist

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or an evolutionary biologist

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or a toxicologist, then it follows

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that if an endocrine disrupting chemical is interfering

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with animal reproduction

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and EDCs do have harmful effects on fertility, then

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that chemical is threatening species survival.

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But animal lives are actually a lot more complex,

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a lot more contingent on a great many other variables.

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And it's an explicitly queer approach

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that helps scientists theorize

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beyond the heterosexist ideology that all

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of biology can be reduced to male female procreation.

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And when the frog biologists I mentioned earlier let go of

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The assumption that EDCs were causing gayness and

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therefore species decline in frogs, he discovered

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that it was in fact higher temperatures

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that were causing disproportionate male frog mortality.

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So this queer approach strengthens biology, right,

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provides new exciting clues

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and answers to important questions about global warming

15:10.845 --> 15:12.285
and frog vitality.

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So I've been working with evolutionary biologist

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and animal behavior scientist Amica,

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to conduct an intersectional feminist analysis

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of the science of animal behavior

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that book feminism in the wild is coming out in 2025.

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When it comes to toxicology specifically,

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I think more collaborations between critical theorists

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and practicing toxicologists need to take place.

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And these collaborations need institutional

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and financial support.

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I can't expect toxicologists

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to be experts in critical race feminism anymore than they

15:44.905 --> 15:47.065
can expect me to be an expert in

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pharmacokinetics or what have you.

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Scientists and science studies

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scholars ought to work together.

15:53.615 --> 15:57.135
I think we'll produce better, more justice oriented science

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and policy if we diversify, not just in terms

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of representation, but also in terms of epistemology

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As currently practiced, toxicology cannot

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and does not tell us what we need

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to know about toxic chemicals in order

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to protect public and environmental health.

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Because toxicologists are actively discouraged from learning

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about or otherwise addressing the political economy

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and violent legacies

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of chemical manufacturing and deployment.

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But a study of toxicity that is infused

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with critical feminist analyses of power

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will produce much more accurate and actionable data.

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