Poisoned Subjects: Testimonial Justice in Toxic Life Narrative

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 foundational to the body of knowledge ecocritics call “toxic discourse.” 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: 1) diethylstilbestrol narratives DES Daughter, Daughters at Risk, and DES Stories; 2) multiple chemical sensitivity testimony collections The Dispossessed and Amputated Lives; and 3) alternative food exposés The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Tomatoland. Across successive chapters, this 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 interrogate toxic discourse’s implicit messages about disability, reproduction, and justice. 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.PhDEnglish and Women's StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111364/1/eclind_1.pd