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

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Author
Lamoreaux, Janelle
Affiliation
Univ Arizona, Anthropol
Issue Date
2019-03
Keywords
China
toxicity
endocrine-disrupting chemicals
pollution
Yangtze River
Greenpeace
milk powder
environmental activism
hormones

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Publisher
UNIV CALIFORNIA BERKELEY, INST EAST ASIAN STUDIES
Citation
Lamoreaux, Janelle. 2019. "'Swimming in Poison': Reimagining Endocrine Disruption through China’s Environmental Hormones." Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review (e-journal) 30: 78–100. https://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/e-journal/issue-30/lamoreaux.
Journal
CROSS-CURRENTS-EAST ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE REVIEW
Rights
© Cross-Currents, 2019. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.
Collection Information
This 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 repository@u.library.arizona.edu.
Abstract
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.
Note
Open access journal
ISSN
2158-9666
DOI
10.1353/ach.2019.0008
Version
Final published version
Sponsors
Wenner-Gren Foundation; National Science Foundation; Social Science Research Council; Wellcome Trust; University of Arizona's School of Anthropology
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