toxic bodies/toxic environments: an interdisciplinary

NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND METHODS for the detection of toxins, particularly endocrine disruptors, have drawn increasing attention to the pervasive and persistent presence of synthetic chemicals in our lives. Some of these tests, such as biomonitoring and body-burden analyses, highlight that we not only experience our environment in obvious ways, but that we also are united with it at the molecular level. Trace chemicals found in the air, water, and soil are now being detected within us. The very chemical composition of our bodies is being altered in ways that reflect the transformations of our everyday environments. Chemicals occupy a position along the border between the “natural” and “cultural” worlds. Industrial chemicals, in particular, prove difficult to categorize. They are artifacts of an industrial society brought into being within a highly specific cultural infrastructure. And yet they increasingly occupy a part of the natural world—and as persistent chemicals, many of them will continue to be a part of the world far into the future, beyond the point of remembering their origins as artificial or synthetic. These landscapes, which now contain the various molecular traces of the industrialized world, are not simply environments that can be avoided—as we might once have tried with “contaminated” spaces like those around Chernobyl. These spaces are occupied by people, among others. They are landscapes of life, and therefore “landscapes of exposure.” 1 Gregg Mitman, Michelle Murphy, and Christopher Sellers’s collection, Landscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and Illness in Modern Environment, brought together the disparate threads of knowledge