Powerless science?

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"Swimming in Poison": Reimagining Endocrine Disruption through China's Environmental Hormones

This article analyzes media responses to a 2010 Greenpeace China report titled Swimming in Poison. Among other alarming data, the report states that fish from collection points along the Yangtze River showed elevated levels of harmful "environmental hormones" (huanjing jisu), also referred to as endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs). Scholars have critiqued EDC science and activism for its heteronormative pathologizing of intersexuality, nonreproductive sexual activity, and impaired fertility, drawing attention to the "sex panic" at work in EDC discourse. This article shows that such sex panic is neither necessary nor universal in anxieties surrounding EDCs. Unlike media responses to EDC events in Europe and North America, Chinese news articles that followed the report did not focus on anxieties surrounding sexual transgression. Instead, media reactions focused on food safety, industrial capitalism, and the ecological scope of pollution. Based on this analysis, the author argues that the disruptive quality and analytic potential of China's environmental hormones has less to do with a defense of sexual purity or bodily integrity, and more to do with acknowledging the depths to which human and nonhuman bodies in today's China are suffused with the sometimes toxic social, economic, political, and chemical environments in which people eat, grow, and live.Wenner-Gren Foundation; National Science Foundation; Social Science Research Council; Wellcome Trust; University of Arizona's School of AnthropologyOpen access journalThis item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]

Toward Intergenerational Ethnography: Kinship, Cohorts, and Environments in and Beyond the Biosocial Sciences

Situated alongside and drawing from emerging inquiry, debate, and reflection about making and unmaking kin at a moment of critical reflection on racial, social, and reproductive inequities and changing environments, this special edition considers how anthropology can ethnographically examine and engage with intergenerational dynamics as they influence different scales and spheres of life. It brings together medical anthropologists and science and technology scholars conducting research in Bangladesh, China, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and the United States as they reflect on the un/making of kin in settings of expert knowledge production and dissemination, including practices of seed collecting, epigenetic science, birth cohort studies, social policy generation, and clinical trials. Contributors to this special issue consider how intergenerational relations and modes of transmission take form in and through biosocial research-both as an object of study and a method of analysis. [intergenerational, environmental change, kinship, biosocial]

“Swimming in Poison”: Reimagining Endocrine Disruption through China’s Environmental Hormones

This article analyzes media responses to a 2010 Greenpeace China report titled Swimming in Poison. Among other alarming data, the report states that fish from collection points along the Yangtze River showed elevated levels of harmful “environmental hormones” (huanjing jisu), also referred to as endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs). Scholars have critiqued EDC science and activism for its heteronormative pathologizing of intersexuality, nonreproductive sexual activity, and impaired fertility, drawing attention to the “sex panic” at work in EDC discourse. This article shows that such sex panic is neither necessary nor universal in anxieties surrounding EDCs. Unlike media responses to EDC events in Europe and North America, Chinese news articles that followed the report did not focus on anxieties surrounding sexual transgression. Instead, media reactions focused on food safety, industrial capitalism, and the ecological scope of pollution. Based on this analysis, the author argues that the disruptive quality and analytic potential of China’s environmental hormones has less to do with a defense of sexual purity or bodily integrity, and more to do with acknowledging the depths to which human and nonhuman bodies in today’s China are suffused with the sometimes toxic social, economic, political, and chemical environments in which people eat, grow, and live

Infertile Futures: Sperm and Science in a Chinese Environment

Based primarily on fieldwork conducted over one year in Beijing and Nanjing, two centers of scientific research and environmental activism in the People's Republic of China, my study explores the ways both scientists and social scientists envision and establish the relationship between exterior environmental problems and interior reproductive health concerns. I argue that during investigations into the quality and quantity of sperm in contemporary China, scientists both examine and produce toxic `environments' of exposure. Toxicologists find that their research subjects embody China's history of industrialism and rapid social change, which become investigable through genetic and epigenetic studies of sperm. Through interviews with faculty and graduate students at multiple universities, participant observation at reproductive toxicology laboratories, and interviews at environmental activist organizations, I explore the way experts and activists bring Chinese environments into being, and the way these environments are found to correlate with changes to reproductive health in China.Reflections from fieldwork have been brought to questions of interest within anthropology more generally, including the definitions and relationships between nature and culture, the universal and particular, the individual and the collective, as well as the body and what stands outside it. Each chapter is concerned with how anthropologists today make sense of interiors and exteriors, content and context. I bring these concerns first and foremost to scientific practice, using the methodology of those I study as a guide for what an anthropology of sperm (and perhaps the body and illness) might look like. In particular, I argue that epigenetic studies of male infertility and birth defects use sperm-environment interaction as a means to understand the biological impact of social processes on the body. The infertility of a toxic Chinese environment, whether brought into being in the laboratory or conceptualized as a devastated national landscape, is understood as correlated with the infertility of male Chinese bodies. Scientists are, then, embracing an understanding of biosocial problems that transcend both biological causation and individual responsibility to enable a form of social critique that takes seriously the epistemological and ontological stakes of thinking environmentally across bodies, generations and domains.Second, I bring these concerns of interiors/exteriors, content and context to questions of scientific translation, asking: how do scientific findings move between transnational, expert and disciplinary domains, even as these contexts (or environments) are brought into being through scientific practice? I argue that scientific practice in China today is effective at translating between domains because of, not in spite of, the toxicity and ambiguity of the environment. Toxicity allows science to proceed, even as reproductive toxicologists work to expose the damage that accompanies toxic exposure. Understood as multiplicity, the ambiguity of the environment benefits scientists, who meet multiple ethical and material research demands. The environment's ambiguity also facilitates an indirect environmental activism, which strives to evoke public attention toward environmental destruction through correlation, not causation. Here, the political stakes of correlative findings prove as if not more powerful than causative evidentiary claims