Keywords: estrogenic, xenogenesis, plastic, pollution
NOTE: This is a lecture that I gave for the American Studies Association in 2022. This essay is left in its original format. A provocation.
1
I am honored to be included in this panel—thank you, my fellow panelists there: Salar Mameni, Jian Chen, Zakiyyah Jackson, and Mel Chen—all of you have helped me in one way or another in writing this paper today.
And to all of you watching this, I greatly appreciate you allowing me to present remotely from the Netherlands. Online presentations now carry reminiscences of the loss and anxiety—as well as the intensified labor—that we have all endured, however differently, from the ongoing Covid pandemic. So, I am especially thankful for your allowance.
2
This talk is unfinished partly because I am taking the advice of my friend, art historian Dr. Kirsten Pai Buick, and treating the problem of the prefix xeno- (as in xenoestrogenesis, my title) as travel writing that goes in the “wrong” direction with purpose. Her advice is, partly, disciplinary scolding—what the hell are non-Art Historians doing with art?—but also, as she wrote to me, “How this ‘reverse conquest’ [the xeno- of xenoestrogenic pollution] affects and effects the imperial centers . . . the consequences of xeno- traveling” to its conceptual origins, empire.
Taking her guidance, I want to start with a painting as not a destination—not where xeno- goes to the estrogenic—but where the estrogenic is already the work of xeno- and in which the idea of travel—or of toxicity and pollution, or even xenogenesis—is what ensures estrogenesis. Don’t worry! I will try to clarify this thesis point as I go.
3
The painting that I am working with is, Birth of Venus (1993) [details: size, medium], by the artist Frank Moore. It is the unseen object of my abstract—how I would define the problem that I am calling “xenoestrogenesis.”
Moore died of AIDS in 2002 and situated that pandemic within environmental collapse—even the treatment of AIDS, he painted, was ecological destruction. Gratuitous: life already marked for death (the story of AIDS) but pharmaceutically preserved (the story of HIV) becomes distributed dying through ecology (the story of environmental injustice and pollution). His paintings ask the unbearable question: Life at what cost? Unbearable, because he asked it from his hospital bed. A question that many of us will ask in one way or another if you have not already done so.
Here, Moore paints sperm beaching themselves against the creamy shoreline, that wet, curved lip. Jellyfish—Medusa—drift with industrial nerve-webs on the waves. This horizon is intertidal, diagonal from top right to bottom left. No conventional seascape here. No setting sun or J.M.W. Turner-like spray and clouds. No, this dividing line is an interlacing of surgical tubing and jeweled knots of seaweed. Star-Kist tuna cans and crabs. Nail polish and condoms.
Is she a worm, segmented and hermaphroditic, able to split to become? Has she just come from that flushed, magenta sphincter? Or is it an umbilical cord? Or a drainpipe? Or the undersea cables that Nicole Staroseilski (2015) teaches us about? Her softened penis is foam-coated and rosy, matching her pink acrylic nails that point to her pelvis. Sparkling clutch-purse with keys and cash. More condoms. Syringes, pill bottles, medications, and other consumer products litter the beach. Washed up. And still, her eyeliner is perfect. Her wig flawless. Lips glossed with nary a smudge—an accomplishment given the scene. What message is in that bottle?
In writing about plastic (the material), Roland Barthes could have also been writing about Moore’s Venus: “Plastic is in essence the stuff of alchemy. More than a substance, plastic is the very idea of infinite transformation” (1972, 97). Is she a mermaid merman? A shemale? A drag queen? Rupaul tells us that we are “born naked and the rest is drag.” But this sea-ster—from naked to nude, that art historical effect—is posed as an odalisque. A technology of empire, the odalisque is an artistic genre of racialization, the racial making of gender, working to make Venus “her.”
It is this question of the odalisque and the racial formation of gender that I want to come back to . . . but first . . . . xenoestrogens.
What I find interesting about this frothy-sphincter-worm (the model is the drag queen Lady Bunny—some of you will already know this—her styling gives her away) is how the material culture of gender maintenance and its transgression—from pharmaceuticals, toiletries, stylization, cosmetics, just to name a few example—rely on plastic (much of which is composed of hormone disrupting compounds, particularly those called xenoestrogens) that now toxify the planet around.
4
Before I knew this painting, but was already living its representation, I had written about environmental plastics and endocrine disruption in 2010 with a few newspaper articles for the Independent Weekly in Durham, North Carolina. From a hospital bed where I was being treated, I wrote:
“The headline ‘Kermit to Kermette’ is lurid, but while the herbicide Atrazine causes hermaphroditism in frogs, exposure to carcinogens, neurotoxins and mutagens affects all of us, if differently. It is the reality of our everyday lives. The possibility of cancer, diabetes, immune system breakdown and heart disease are a few of the bodily crises that we all face. These more common diseases, many of which are environmentally induced, are killing people and animals in alarmingly high numbers. This ought to be our rallying call rather than some cri de cœur— a cry from the heart—about degenerate sexes.”
5
In 2013—with a former colleague at Uppsala University in Sweden—Malin-Ah-King and I co-authored an essay titled “Toxic Sexes.” [Co-authoring kept me connected to an academic world that—despite the proliferation of disability discourse—is foundationally intolerant to life].
Our essay was inspired by her and Sören Nylin’s important evolutionary science work that rethinks the adumbrations we attribute to the domain called “sex” (citation?). Sex, Ah-king and Nylin clarify through their science, is a potential rather than a specific or discrete characteristic. A potential that is as vulnerable to place (and its context) as it is too time. A potential, then, that exceeds sexual plasticity because it is not defined by discreteness. In other words, what we call sexual difference (and its changeability) are abstractions that badly represent the potential that is sex.
Ah-King and I wanted to apply this model of sex as potential to the question of hormone disrupting compounds, particularly to xenoestrogenic agents associated with plastic, plastic dumping, and pollution. In this work, we challenged the “sex panic” of endocrine-disrupting discourse that objectified sexual difference and sex change (or sexual plasticity) as characteristics, and to shift the focus to how plastic pollution is as much about cancer, autoimmune disease, and an array of illnesses that disruptions of hormones—of “sex” hormones—are effects of. Simply, we wanted to show how pollution discourse distorted sex into its most reductive form, even if—and perhaps especially when—that form also performed change.
6
Out of this collaborative work, I wrote about how endocrine-disruption discourse screened the geo-politics of environmental racism. That is, the spectacle of pollution induced sexual change obscured—and continues to—the reality that much of the trashing of plastic as well as its manufacturing waste is defined by environmental racism. Max Liboiron says it succinctly, “pollution is colonialism” (citation) Many scholars, including Mel Chen (2012), Harriet Washington (2020), and Dorceta Taylor (2014), have shown how toxification of bodies and communities are inextricable from structural racism.
The xeno-estrogens of plastic, then, are gratuitous in their racialization. The prefix xeno- is meant, etymologically speaking, to carry racism to the endocrine system by way of estrogen. While, simultaneously, the racism of hormone disrupting pollution induced by xenoestrogens shows-up as racialized health disparities that reify racial imaginaries. Xenoestrogenic pollution, I suggest, might offer additional illustration of aspects of the mode of anti-blackness that Zakiyyah Jackson describes as “plasticity,” in her book Becoming Human (2020).
7
With these ideas about xenoestrogens—its sexual and racial coordination—I want to return to Moore’s Venus painting to think about the drag of his odalisque, of the nude white queer on the beach with the seemingly absurd question: How does drag concern ecological catastrophe, particularly in the form called racism?
To start to answer this question, I am considering how one of the ways that plasticized estrogens produce ill-health disease is by mimicking and imitating those generated by our endocrine systems, signaling an array of hormonal responses in our bodies. Some hormonal responses are temporary, but others radically alter organismal life, making life simply unlivable.
So, in relation to Moore’s Venus, the unstable plastics of, say, clothing, cosmetics, and everyday materials that reproduce gender legibility (in whatever transgressive or normative—trans or nontrans—or even illegible forms, nonbinary and queer) also introduce bodies and environments to hormonal disruption in the making, using, and trashing of those plasticized materials.
It is this aspect of xenoestrogens as bio-mimicry, as chemicals that imitate hormones that has me thinking about Moore’s use of drag to illustrate the “toxic beauty” (the title of one of his monographs) of plastic pollution—in all of its racial violence—in the form of imitative gender pollution.
8
We remember Judith Butler’s field defining discussion of drag in Gender Trouble (1990), where they write: “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself” (GT 137). That is, cross-gendering “brings into relief” gender as performative (of course, “citationality” will replace performativity in their next book Bodies That Matter). (We also remember that Bodies That Matter was a redress of misunderstandings of Gender Trouble, one among these was the dematerialization of the body). But, either in performative or citational forms, the function of imitation remains important in the denaturalizing of copies that pretend to originality. In other words, as Butler writes, “Gender is a kind of persistent impersonation that passes as the real” (GT x). As some of you will know, this is the point that prompts Jay Prosser in Second Skins to attempt to dislodge the transsexual from transgender (reading transgender as already a queer project). For him, the transsexual is sexual trouble, a problem of sex and, I would add, its potential.
It is imitation that operationalizes sex as gender all along, making possible many kinds of gender identities without recourse to corporeality (physiology, anatomy, etc.), but still demanding a bodily cost (what citationality clarifies). That imitation is the reality effect, that carries a cost—we might just as well call it violence rather than cost (Prosser makes this his central argument in his critique of Butler’s “transsexual ambivalence”—in Butler’s reading of Paris is Burning—although I might just call this ambivalence transmisogyny). Most recently, Jackson has challenged feminism to interrogate how the gender binary is racialized. She writes, “We have neither adequately identified that racialization is intrinsic to the legibility of its codes and grammar, namely that antiblackness constitutes and disrupts sex/gender constructs, nor determined the consequences this has for the matter of the sexed body” (BH 9). Imitational role in gender/sex—how we have come to potentialize gender from sex, even making sex gender—it seems to me, is one such function where racial violence is necessitated so that citationality can be dramatized.
9
So, taking Moore’s Venus—and hormone mimicking pollution it represents in the guise of drag, of gender as imitative structure of sex itself—I want to ask: How does sex as gender imitation—that is to say, gender as a social construction—need racialization to enact that citationality? That is to ask, how does cross-gendered performance (whether Lady Bunny’s drag or plastic pollution “sex panic” discourse) need racialization to: 1) dematerialize sex as gender, enabling copies to pretend to originality; and 2) to instantiate the citation as a violence (as racism, and for example, the environmental racism associated with plastic making/using/trashing).
Or—another way of asking these questions—is to return to Moore’s charge about AIDS and environment: Life at what cost? We, and I do mean it inclusively even if the costs are vastly different, might instead ask, “Gender as construction at what cost?” Which is also to ask, “Gender as non-binary, as trans, as performative as as as . . . at what cost”?
This line of questioning is already somewhat illustrated by Moore’s painting. The odalisque is an artistic genre that takes is name and form from the history of Orientalism. Through the eroticization of gender, racial and social hierarchy of the “chambermaid” is obscured by making the body nude. This is queerly restaged by Moore, while dragging together the violence that is sex-change panic of “xenoestrogens” which “mimic or imitate” the endocrine system’s own activities/substances, producing ill-health and disease as racial disparity.
10
So, to end, the industrial material we call plastic holds together and pulls apart—often both at once—the imitative promise of gender that is meant to mark the limits of sex (to say nothing of corporeality). Barthes’s description of plastic “as infinite transformation”—that toxic force—is no better represented than by contemporary gender discourse itself (what many of us call our departments of Gender Studies). For trans studies—what has become the transgressive renewal for institutionalizing Gender Studies—the question is: how might Prosser’s invitation to be troubled by sex, by corporeality, and I would add troubled by anatomy and physiology, be a necessary—even urgent—rejoinder to the imitative plasticity we have made of gender?
About the Author
Eva Hayward is an Assistant Professor in Gender & Women's Studies at the University of Arizona, Tucson. She has taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the University of New Mexico, Uppsala University (Sweden), Duke University, and the University of Cincinnati. Her research focuses on the study of sensation, sexuality, and science. She has published articles in Transgender Studies Quarterly, Cultural Anthropology, Parallax, differences,
Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Women and Performance.
Citation
Hayward, Eva. 2024. “Xenoextrogenesis: Disrupted Ecology of an Odalisque.” TSQ*Now, Transgender Studies Quarterly 11, no. 4. http://www.tsqnow.online/xenoestrogenesis-disrupted-ecology-of-an-odalisque
Comentários