The Anthropology of Toxicity

In Sunaura Taylor’s writings on “sensitive aquifers” and “disabled ecologies,” she foregrounds how designations of disability do not refer to an ontological fact of being, but rather emerge as a result of particular conditions of relation amongst various bodies, materials, and notions of wellness. It is this point borrowed from disability scholars that she applies to her critique of normative environmentalism. Additionally, Taylor notes how 19^th century notions of sensitivity more broadly were conceived in gendered terms, as the term was typically feminized and positioned in contrast to notions of masculine individualism. Ubiquitous toxicity and the everyday interaction of humans (and ecosystems) with toxic materials (at varying temporal and physical scales) troubles the myth of masculine individualism at the same time that it upholds and affirms the necessity to protect boundaries of various kinds in order to sustain life itself. Along these lines, Elizabeth Roberts’ study of how various kinds of boundaries in neighborhoods bordering Mexico City can, perhaps paradoxically, enable life to flourish is helpful to think with. As Roberts notes, the task at hand isn’t simply identifying boundaries and tearing them down, but, keeping in mind that boundaries are an integral aspect of any connective system, understanding the form particular boundaries take and the political possibilities and foreclosures such forms enact is what we must understand. Sensitivity in this sense can be imagined as a site for thinking through the “how” of borders and boundaries and the political possibilities and inevitable foreclosures that transpire in their making.