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2 Eros and X-rays: Bodies, Class, and “Environmental Justice”
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Eros and X-rays: Bodies, Class, and “Environmental Justice” TWO Evidently your body knows your class position no matter how well you have been taught to deny it. —Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, Biology under the Influence What does it mean for the body to “know” something as seemingly abstract as one’s place within a class system? “Knowing” may not be the best term, as it poses “the body” as a facsimile of a rational human subject. Such an epistemology demands complication, especially when we consider that the most legitimized forms of knowing the human body require the instruments and institutions of science and medicine, neither of which is immune to ideology. Nonetheless, Lewontin and Levins’s contention provokes us to question what the body of the worker can reveal and who is socially positioned to articulate those revelations. They alert us to the “codetermination” of biological and social causes, asserting that “[w]hereas human sociality is itself a consequence of our received biology, human biology is a socialized biology” (36): Racism becomes an environmental factor affecting adrenals and other organs in ways that tigers or venomous snakes did in earlier historical epochs. The conditions under which labor power is sold in a capitalist labor market act on the 28 | Bodily Natures individual’s glucose cycle as the pattern of exertion and rest depends more on the employer’s economic decisions than on the worker’s self perception of metabolic flux. Human ecology is not the relation of our species with the rest of nature, but rather the relations of different societies, and the classes, genders, ages, grades, and ethnicities maintained by those social structures. Thus, it is not too farfetched to speak of the pancreas under capitalism or the proletarian lung. (37) Casting racism as environmental exposes how sociopolitical forces generate landscapes that infiltrate human bodies. Similarly, the “pancreas under capitalism ” and the “proletarian lung” testify to the penetrating physiological effects of class (and racial) oppression, demonstrating that the biological and the social cannot be considered separate spheres. And yet the images of the pancreas and the lung, displayed as in an autopsy, section workers’ bodies, making them the object of scientific discourses and medical models of evidence that demand expertise and legitimation. The oppressed, it seems, may be physically affected by economic and social systems and yet be unable to produce evidence for their biosocial conditions. Before considering how two leftist authors, writing primarily in the early twentieth century, addressed the material effects of economic systems, we should address the question of the worker’s body more generally. The image of the proletarian lung may give us pause. If ostensibly external social forces have transformed an internal bodily organ, does this movement across the social and the biological, the private body and the social system, suggest traffic among other personal, political, epistemological, institutional, and disciplinary domains? The lung certainly “belongs” to the worker, and yet it may also be scrutinized by experts in medicine, law, “industrial hygiene,” occupational health, insurance claims, and union organizing (as well as by the academic writings of Lewontin, Levins, and myself). The proletarian lung illustrates my conception of trans-corporeality, in that the human body is never a rigidly enclosed, protected entity, but is vulnerable to the substances and flows of its environments, which may include industrial environments and their social/economic forces. Coming to grips with the biological/social condition of this lung may provoke new modes of literary production and analysis, which may be more jagged, or more hesitant, but also more permeable. It may be useful to consider the proletarian lung within the networks of nature/culture, which are “simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, like discourse, and collective, like society” (Latour, We Have Never Been Modern 6). The late twentieth-century framework of environmental justice offers potent avenues of approach to the sort of trans-corporeality exemplified by the proletarian lung. Indeed, environmental justice insists upon the material interconnections between specific bodies and specific places, especially the peoples and areas that have been literally dumped upon. Environmental justice social movements and modes of analysis target the unequal distribution of environmental benefits [3.233.232.21] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:04 GMT) Eros and X-rays | 29 and environmental harms, tracing how race and class (and sometimes gender and sexuality) profoundly influence material, often place-based inequities. Race, for example, has been well documented as the single most important factor in the placement of toxic waste sites in...