People with illnesses caused by toxic exposure are often referred to as canaries: like canaries in coal mines, they warn others of the mounting harm of everyday exposure to the toxic products of capitalism, from personal care products to industrial effluent. As part of the Chemical Entanglements initiative at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women (CSW), we are exploring how visual representations of canary narratives can serve as activist tools and challenge gendered conceptions of chronic illness as imagined or hysterical.
In collaboration with artist and poet Peggy Munson, CSW has produced a series of cartoon-like provocations designed to confront viewers with the violence and harm caused by toxic personal care products, particularly to women, people of color, LGBTQ individuals, and other already-vulnerable persons. Building on this work, we aim to produce imagery to accompany a forthcoming series of oral histories. These oral histories will document the lives of activists who work to expose the accumulating damage caused by toxicants, and in so doing, advocate for change at both individual and institutional levels. How, we ask, can visualizing their narratives underscore how toxic exposure is a gender equity issue? How might these visualizations work in concert with data visualizations to persuade policymakers to take action to protect the public health? In addition to creating new visualizations, we will collect and invite crowdsourced commentary on existing artistic representations of the symptoms of toxic exposure (from graphic novels, zines, films, etc.) created by chronically ill individuals. In so doing, we will ask what a feminist approach—one that is intersectional, which advocates without objectifying, which centers marginal perspectives--to visualizing canary narratives might look like.
References
Hyland, Tara. 1999. “Creative Meaning-Making: Reading the Bookworks of Lise Melhorn-Boe.” Journal of Artists' Books 11: 11-15.
International Programme on Chemical Safety. 2002. Global Assessment of the State-of-the-Science of Endocrine Disruptors. Geneva:World Health Organization. 2002. Accessed November 20, 2018: http://www.who.int/ipcs/publications/new_issues/endocrine_disruptors/en/
Johnston, Jill E., and Andrea Hricko.2017. “Industrial Lead Poisoning in Los Angeles: Anatomy of a Public Health Failure.” Environmental Justice 10 (5): 162-167. http://doi.org/10.1089/env.2017.0019
Miller, Claudia S.1997. “Toxicant-induced loss of tolerance--an emerging theory of disease?” Environmental Health Perspectives,105 (Suppl 2), 445–453.
Porter, Catherine A., et al. 2009. Overexposed and Underinformed: Dismantling Barriers to Health and Safety in California Nail Salons. Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative. Accessed November 20, 2018: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5783e9b9be6594e480435ffe/t/58f449...
Zwillinger, Rhonda. 1998. The dispossessed: living with multiple chemical sensitivities. Paulden, AZ: Dispossessed Project.
People with illnesses caused by toxic exposure are often referred to as canaries: like canaries in coal mines, they warn others of the mounting harm of everyday exposure to the toxic products of capitalism, from personal care products to industrial effluent. As part of the Chemical Entanglements initiative at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women (CSW), we are exploring how visual representations of canary narratives can serve as activist tools and challenge gendered conceptions of chronic illness as imagined or hysterical.
In collaboration with artist and poet Peggy Munson, CSW has produced a series of cartoon-like provocations designed to confront viewers with the violence and harm caused by toxic personal care products, particularly to women, people of color, LGBTQ individuals, and other already-vulnerable persons. Building on this work, we aim to produce imagery to accompany a forthcoming series of oral histories. These oral histories will document the lives of activists who work to expose the accumulating damage caused by toxicants, and in so doing, advocate for change at both individual and institutional levels. How, we ask, can visualizing their narratives underscore how toxic exposure is a gender equity issue? How might these visualizations work in concert with data visualizations to persuade policymakers to take action to protect the public health? In addition to creating new visualizations, we will collect and invite crowdsourced commentary on existing artistic representations of the symptoms of toxic exposure (from graphic novels, zines, films, etc.) created by chronically ill individuals. In so doing, we will ask what a feminist approach—one that is intersectional, which advocates without objectifying, which centers marginal perspectives--to visualizing canary narratives might look like.
References
Hyland, Tara. 1999. “Creative Meaning-Making: Reading the Bookworks of Lise Melhorn-Boe.” Journal of Artists' Books 11: 11-15.
International Programme on Chemical Safety. 2002. Global Assessment of the State-of-the-Science of Endocrine Disruptors. Geneva:World Health Organization. 2002. Accessed November 20, 2018: http://www.who.int/ipcs/publications/new_issues/endocrine_disruptors/en/
Johnston, Jill E., and Andrea Hricko.2017. “Industrial Lead Poisoning in Los Angeles: Anatomy of a Public Health Failure.” Environmental Justice 10 (5): 162-167. http://doi.org/10.1089/env.2017.0019
Miller, Claudia S.1997. “Toxicant-induced loss of tolerance--an emerging theory of disease?” Environmental Health Perspectives,105 (Suppl 2), 445–453.
Porter, Catherine A., et al. 2009. Overexposed and Underinformed: Dismantling Barriers to Health and Safety in California Nail Salons. Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative. Accessed November 20, 2018: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5783e9b9be6594e480435ffe/t/58f449...
Zwillinger, Rhonda. 1998. The dispossessed: living with multiple chemical sensitivities. Paulden, AZ: Dispossessed Project.
Substantive Caption:
The early works of Canadian artist Lise Melhorn-Boe inquired into the thwarted, deferred, and transferred artistic desires of women. In Color Me Dutiful (1986), Melhorn-Boe collected stories elicited from women as to why they wear make-up, printing those desires and recollections on oval paper leaflets (i.e., faces) collected in a receptacle whose cover is a plaster cast of her own mienne. After becoming ill with breast cancer and, then, felled by exposure to mold, Melhorn-Boe returned to the oval leaflets with a new awareness of environmental toxins that had likely contributed to her own health. Toxic Face Book (2008) returns to the landscape of the face and lists the chemical ingredients of the many emollients and hues that women use regularly. The artist’s life history of exposures to heavy metals are also rendered via a pop-up book, No Safe Levels (2006), figuring a topography of rolling hills and peaks, the overall shape based on her body’s profile while lying sideways and inscribed with the heavy metals that turned up in her laboratory panel. In What’s for Dinner (2011), a textual homage and spin on Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, she prompts the picnic goer to unfold a series of meals that list the contaminants in food that contribute to total body burden. The large (40 inch) fold-out work, Body Map (2009), features a photograph of the artist’s post-mastectomy figure, with a personal and public environmental history inscribed across various body parts.
Design Statement:
We selected this visualization because:
Melhorn-Boe’s “thick description” art, detailing encounters with toxicity, has been less quick to sell than earlier work. Though her table-top treasure boxes, origami-ed landscapes, and pop-up book/ quilt mashups cry out to be touched, they also record how we are contaminated and in constant contact with EDCs. The art provides an ethnographic encounter, making tactile the invisible chemicals that surround us. However, the lay public wishes to keep the knowledge about the risks of living in (post)industrial ecologies at a distance.
The visual art represents something soft that might offer solace against the ominous lists of chemicals/EDCs. Melhorn-Boe sews and folds stories of living in non-purity, in contaminated and disabled canary being into missives of tactile communion.
Substantive Caption:
Allergist/immunologist Claudia Miller has proposed that, once individuals reach a threshold of total “body burden,” they are susceptible to TILT (Toxicant Induced Loss of Tolerance) thereby reacting to small amounts of previously tolerated chemicals. Diagnosis of MCS (Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS) for TILT-ed individuals is more common among white populations, suggesting a disparity in treatment among minorities. The educational and activist aims of these postcards, commissioned by the Chemical Entanglements Project at UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women, includes acknowledging people of color who have been at the forefront of environmental justice efforts. All three images created by disability artist Peggy Munson (who herself has MCS) feature individuals with masks over the faces. One card features an Asian woman resting at an abandoned gas station repurposed as a beauty salon, to draw the connection between toxic ingredients in many salon products and their petroleum rootstocks. Another image shows an African American woman and her dog as they debark from a camper with a label “SAFE” scrawled on its rear. This card acknowledges the difficulty for those with MCS to find safe housing because of off-gassing chemicals in building materials. The third postcard presents a woman wearing a respirator, her arms around an African American gender non-binary individual--an image of mutual alliance and support. Each postcard has a set of check-boxes that evoke the medical questionnaires given to patients. Here, the sender of the postcard would put an “x” in a box linked to phrases such as “My symptoms grow urgent around scented detergent,” and “Modern people have the vapors from chemical capers” that serve as messages warning that access for those with MCS runs inversely to the distribution of accessory fragrances by chemical manufacturers.
Design Statement:
We present this visualization because:
By commissioning art from someone in the Multiple Chemical Sensitivity/ Environmental Illness community, we hoped to make insider knowledge available to a wider public.
It represents our naiveté around what constituted the “low hanging fruit” in explaining the under-regulation of endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) to a wider public. The sources of EDCs are myriad. We thought it surprising, and little known, that EDCs comprise common cosmetics, toiletries and household cleaners whose scents are advertised to odor-fearing consumers. We mistakenly assumed that the general population would only need to be made aware of the potential hazards in “fragranced” products. However, these images struck many as more offensive than informative.
Rachel Lee and Alexandra Apolloni. 21 November 2018, "Canary Narratives: Visualizing Gender, Chronic Illness, and Exposure", Center for Ethnography, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 23 April 2019, accessed 22 December 2024. http://centerforethnography.org/content/canary-narratives-visualizing-gender-chronic-illness-and-exposure