Surviving difference: Endocrine-disrupting chemicals,intergenerational justice and the future of human reproduction

Abstract

Endocrine-disrupting chemicals have been identified as posing risks to reproductive health and may have intergenerational effects. However, responses to the potential harms they pose frequently rely on medicalised understandings of the body and normative gender identities. This article develops an intersectional feminist framework of intergenerational justice in response to the potential risks posed by endocrine-disrupting chemicals. We examine critiques of endocrine disruptors from feminist, critical disability and queer standpoints, and explore issues of race and class in exposures. We argue that responding to the risks posed by endocrine disruptors such as brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and phthalates requires developing a theory of intergenerational justice that recognises relationality and transcorporeality, and that also recognises harm in terms of suffering, not in terms of difference.

Keywords

Brominated flame retardants critical disability endocrine-disrupting chemicals intergenerational justice intersectionality phthalates queer theory

The question of justice for future generations has received extensive attention from philosophers, economists and legal scholars, but has largely drawn on the liberal tradition of rights and individual autonomy. Feminist approaches to intergenerational justice have critiqued liberal conceptions of autonomy and drawn on ethics of care in order to ground human rights claims in relationality (Mackenzie and Stoljar, 2000; Downie and Llewellyn, 2011; Mackenzie et al., 2013; Victor and Guidry-Grimes, 2014). However, a key feminist insight of the importance of intersectionality has been missing from most considerations of intergenerational justice. Discussions of intergenerational justice need to recognise the politics of gender, race, poverty, disability and sexuality, all of which are conspicuously absent from the dominant debates on this topic. As Iris Marion Young argues, a concept of justice needs to focus on the elimination of institutionalised oppression, particularly of those who represent ‘difference’ (2011). A liberal, autonomous individual-based approach forms the basis of many formulations of intergenerational justice, but fails to take into account the effects of difference (Woolley, 2000; Abbey, 2013).

Of the host of environmental risks to health, endocrine disruptors have been highlighted as interfering with or altering the biological bases of human sexuality and reproduction (Casals-Casas and Desvergne, 2011). An endocrine disruptor is a chemical with the potential to alter hormone action within the body, possibly resulting in developmental and reproductive anomalies. Endocrine-disrupting chemicals may have potentially lifelong and intergenerational effects on human reproduction and development (Vandenberg et al., 2012; Zoeller et al., 2012). They may negatively impact the fertility of future generations, and the changes they produce may be epigenetic; that is, they may be passed on to future generations (Rissman and Adli, 2014). However, responses to endocrine disruptors’ material effects on the human sexual and reproductive body frequently rely on medicalised understandings of the body (in which human events and problems are increasingly understood as medical problems) (Conrad, 2007), and normative understandings of sex and gender.

Concerns regarding the consequences of endocrine disruptors have historically been both heavily gendered and linked to the health and well-being of future generations. A key example is the widespread use beginning in the 1940s of diethylstilbestrol (DES), one of the earliest chemicals identified as an endocrine disruptor (Langston, 2010). DES was given to pregnant women in the mistaken belief that it would reduce the risk of pregnancy complications and miscarriages, but children of women prescribed DES were later referred to as ‘DES daughters’ when it was discovered that they had higher rates of a number of health issues, including clear cell adenocarcinoma (a rare form of vaginal and cervical cancer), pregnancy complications and infertility. More recently, risks posed by endocrine disruptors are often framed in media coverage and environmental campaigns in terms of widespread ‘feminisation’, uneven sex ratios and the need to protect the integrity of the human species from degeneration (Roberts, 2003, 2007; Di Chiro, 2010). For example, attention to environmental pollution in the Aamjiwnaang First Nations community focused on the dwindling proportion of boys being born on the reserve, rather than high cancer rates (Mackenzie et al., 2005). However, as Scott (2009) argues, when considering the effects of endocrine disruptors we should beware of relying on a static conception of human bodies that takes for granted what constitutes naturalness or normalcy; harm should be identified in terms of suffering, not in terms of difference.

Feminist scholars have long critiqued the identification of women with reproduction, as well as implicitly eugenicist hierarchies of motherhood under which some women’s bodies are viewed as pure, healthy and worthy of protecting, and are strongly encouraged to reproduce, while others are seen as potentially dangerous and contaminated. Queer theorists and disability scholars have challenged heteronormative and ableist understandings of bodies. An ethical response to the intergenerational threats posed by endocrine disruptors must build on these critiques, resisting normative ideals of gender, sexuality, ability and health, while recognising that the unknown future effects of endocrine disruptors call for what Myra Hird (2013) names an environmental ethics of vulnerability, requiring heightened responsibility to prevent future suffering.

This article applies an intersectional feminist approach to intergenerational justice in response to the potential risks posed by endocrine-disrupting chemicals, using the case study of two classes of endocrine disruptors that have emerged as targets of media attention and environmental activism: brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and phthalates.

Endocrine disruptors have garnered widespread attention and concern due to the changes they can produce in human sexual appearance and reproductive processes and function. As many feminist scholars have pointed out, however, sexual difference needs to be understood in terms of constant becoming rather than fixed nature (Butler, 1990, 1993; Grosz, 1994; Braidotti, 2002; Shildrick, 2002; Haraway, 2003, 2007; Grosz, 2011). Following Donna Haraway’s injunction to ‘stay with the trouble’ (2012), we examine critiques of endocrine disruptors from feminist, critical disability and queer standpoints, exploring issues of race and class in exposures. Intragenerational justice (between the members of a given generation) and intergenerational justice (between different generations) must be understood as necessarily connected. Potential harms to present and future generations from BFRs and phthalates may be unequally distributed according to factors such as socioeconomic status, race and sex (Wolff et al., 2007; Zota et al., 2010; Trasande et al., 2013).

In this article, we explore a conception of intergenerational justice that refrains both from medicalising difference and from assuming that individuals are autonomous subjects (that is, young, usually male and able-bodied) (Silvers, 2000). An ethical framework of intergenerational justice must recognise difference rather than promote particular ideals of bodies and citizens. Despite their contested relations, feminist, disability rights and queer ecology responses to endocrine disruptors share a refusal to uphold an ideal body even as they draw critical attention to the harmful impacts of chemical exposures. The intersectional analysis of endocrine disruptors developed in this article contests normative conceptions of bodies that have been affected, moving towards a theorisation of difference in terms of positive becoming.

In exploring concerns of intergenerational justice, we resist visions of the future that perpetuate normative models of embodiment. Theorising the requirement to protect future generations from harm must not foreclose the differences of those future generations. We argue that the concern for the vulnerable child has become paradigmatic of intergenerational justice claims under neoliberalism. This concern displaces other kinds of futures, disguising the ways in which concerns about the reproductive health of populations have frequently reinforced eugenicist aims to promote reproduction for some individuals (positive eugenics) and prevent others from reproducing (negative eugenics) (Kevles, 1999).

The next section will explore some of the ways in which endocrine-disrupting chemicals may affect hormonal processes and the development of gonadal and anatomical sex outside of binary categories. In exploring the effects of exposures to these chemicals, we nevertheless wish to consider the history of normalising medical responses to intersex individuals which has given rise to organised resistance (Feder, 2009). Following Haraway’s definition of queer as ‘not committed to reproduction of kind and having bumptious relations with futurities’ (2012: 301), we argue for a theory of intergenerational justice that is capable of imagining future difference apart from heteronormative conceptions of futurity or a politics of purity; that recognises ongoing processes of entangled becoming (and becoming-with), rather than seeking to protect and reproduce sameness.

Endocrine-disrupting chemicals and their effects

A wide range of substances are thought to cause endocrine disruption, including pharmaceuticals, dioxin and dioxin-like compounds, polychlorinated biphenyls, DDT and other pesticides, and plasticisers such as Bisphenol A. Two types of endocrine-disrupting chemicals that we are exposed to through everyday life have recently become subjects of broad concern for scientists, regulators and environmental NGOs, and have featured prominently in media coverage: BFRs and phthalates. Phthalates are used to make plastics soft and malleable and are found in food packaging and water bottles, but also in car interiors, plumbing, cosmetics and personal care products (Wittassek, 2008; Halden, 2010). Many products that are scented contain phthalates, since they are used as solubulisers (an agent that something is dissolved in). BFRs are intentionally added to products to reduce the risk of fire, and are found in fabrics, furniture foam, carpets and electronics, throughout homes, workplaces, public transit, hospitals, libraries and schools. Because of widespread environmental contamination, house dust and the food supply are also major sources of exposure to BFRs and phthalates (Schecter et al., 2010; Stapleton et al., 2012; Serrano et al., 2014).

There are some indications that BFRs and phthalates have intergenerational effects, although the impacts are still largely uncertain (Rider et al., 2010; Perera and Herbstman, 2011; Albert and Jégou, 2014). Clinical studies indicate that BFRs are impacting early stages of human development and can result in reproductive anomalies, including preterm births and spontaneous abortions (Morales-Suárez-Varela et al., 2011; Small et al., 2011; Peltier et al., 2015). Phthalates negatively impact human reproduction: they are associated with reduced semen quality, endometriosis and shorter gestation periods during pregnancy (Sharpe and Irvine, 2004; Weuve et al., 2010). Phthalates have been linked to both prenatal and postnatal effects, including anomalous development of the male reproductive system (Lottrup, 2006; Martino-Andrade et al., 2009; Rider et al., 2010), with potentially irreversible anti-androgenic effects in fetuses (Kortenkamp, 2010; Albert and Jégou, 2014). There are also indications that early menopause may result from exposure to certain phthalates (Grindler et al., 2015). Assessing the risks from endocrine disruptors is complicated by variance in dose responses, differing vulnerabilities depending on the age of exposure and the complexity of chemical interactions in the environment (Casals-Casas and Desvergne, 2011).

In responding to the potential risks posed by endocrine-disrupting chemicals, it is necessary to carefully consider the historical pathologisation of non-normative sex and sexuality. Growing resistance to surgical interventions in cases of intersex individuals has featured calls to ‘demedicalise’, or remove from the domain of medicine, conditions that could otherwise be considered merely part of human variation. Nevertheless, there are genuine health challenges that may be experienced by intersex individuals (Feder, 2009). Issues of equity and justice must be considered in conjunction with assessments of the potential harms posed by endocrine-disrupting chemicals. In the next section, we take up an intersectional approach to analysing these potential harms and the avenues to avoiding or mediating them.

Intersectionality and the politics of chemical exposures

Preventing exposures to environmental pollution is largely regarded as an individual responsibility, and particularly the responsibility of women (Szasz, 2007; Anstey, 2009; MacKendrick, 2010, 2011; Hessler, 2013; Mackendrick, 2014), consistent with a medicalised conception of the body and a neoliberal model of intensive mothering (Hays, 1998). However, the ways in which risks from endocrine disruptors have been framed are problematic from a feminist perspective because they construct mothers as the primary mediators of risk, and because they rely on binary understandings of sexual difference (Birke, 2003; Roberts, 2007).

Reproduction has traditionally been privatised and excluded from the public (political) sphere of life, and rendered largely the responsibility of women. As a result of the ubiquity of chemical exposures, the maternal body has been popularly conceived as contaminated and potentially hostile to the fetus (Anstey, 2009). The ideal of the ‘good mother’ requires women to preserve the purity of their children against the risks posed by environmental contamination (Cairns et al., 2013). Feminists have pointed out that women are disproportionately blamed for harms to children, with little to no corresponding attention paid to the effects of men’s reproductive capacities on the health of children (Sheldon, 1999; Daniels, 2006). Women are identified much more closely with their reproductive capacities, with men’s reproductive health receiving far less attention (but see: Sheldon, 1999; Barnes, 2014). Mothers bear a primary responsibility for managing their children’s health, and are held disproportionately accountable for any perceived ‘imperfections’ in their children’s physical and mental health (Kukla, 2008).

Norah MacKendrick (2010) coined the term ‘precautionary consumption’ to describe efforts to mediate exposures to chemicals through careful consumption practices, predominantly carried out by women. Exposures to endocrine-disrupting chemicals are ubiquitous and, given the current absence or limits of regulation, exposure to them is difficult, bordering on impossible, to avoid. Thus, attempts to avoid or mediate exposures to endocrine-disrupting chemicals involve significant labour. Research is showing that effects from exposures may depend on multiple factors, such as malnutrition and stress (Gee and Payne-Sturges, 2004). Socioeconomic status is a variable in exposures to these chemicals, although for some endocrine disruptors, higher income is actually associated with higher exposures (Tyrrell et al., 2013). For example, eating organic food, at least in one recent study, was found to actually increase exposure (Sathyanarayana et al., 2013), indicating how avoiding these chemicals is difficult to accomplish.

Reducing and mitigating the risk of exposure to BFRs and phthalates will require increased care work, which is likely to be predominantly carried out by women (Sze, 2007). In the case of impacts on reproduction, women are more likely to be subject to medical interventions in the form of reproductive technologies, the outcomes of which will vary dramatically as a result of socioeconomic and racial disparities (Birke, 2000: 594; Armstrong and Segars, 2013). As Gaard (2010) argues, the rhetoric of ‘choice’ is unjustly used to blame women for fertility problems and to privatise infertility created by environmental causes through assisted reproduction. As a result of these factors, women are likely to bear a disproportionate burden of blame for intergenerational harms caused by endocrine disruptors, and will shoulder more of the work of attempting to remediate these harms.

A feminist ethics should be applied to intergenerational justice (Mackenzie et al., 2013), recognising how we are all interdependent, embodied and relational rather than autonomous individuals (Beasley and Bacchi, 2007). In addressing environmental health concerns, we must avoid retrenching unequal patterns of distributing care work (MacGregor, 2006). Awareness of intergenerational effects of endocrine disruptors might risk increasing perceived maternal responsibility for the health of children, even though individuals have far less control over their own health or the health of their children than is reflected by the individualised approach to managing chemical exposures dominant under neoliberalism (Hessler, 2013). Exposure to chemicals may produce effects throughout the lifespan and may be passed on to future generations. We need to recognise, then, that social structures lead to health inequalities and that women most often bear responsibility for children’s health as well as their own.

An individualistic approach to preventing exposure is flawed, given that bodies are dynamic, involving complex interactions between social and environmental structures and the biological (Birke, 2003). Recognising the porosity of bodies and environments casts doubt on individuals’ ability to manage and control risk (Alaimo, 2010). Lynda Birke argues that endocrine disruptors demonstrate how ‘human biology is a dynamic set of processes, nested in among other dynamic sets of processes or systems (and, in this case, the politics of global capitalism and industrial production)’ (2003: 49). She reminds us that the intergenerational effects of endocrine disruptors are inseparable from social factors such as poverty, class, race, disability and age – factors that influence the exposure levels of members of one generation, and are passed onto another. Furthermore, responding to the threat posed by endocrine-disruptors like BFRs and phthalates requires developing a theory of intergenerational justice that recognises the blurring of categories of human/animal and organic/inorganic, where the effects of natural and synthetic hormones circulate through cyborg bodies and naturecultures in complex and unpredictable ways (Haraway, 2012).

While ‘environmental equity’ can imply the equal sharing of risk burdens, rather than a reduction of the risks overall, ‘environmental justice’ is a more politically charged term, referring to remedial action taken to correct injustices imposed on a specific group of people, primarily people of colour (Cutter, 2006). The environmental justice movement has exposed disparities in chemical exposures, with marginalised people usually being more at risk of negative health effects from exposures (Cole and Foster, 2001). For example, the intergenerational impact of endocrine-disrupting chemicals may be significantly greater on some aboriginal communities because they live in the same place for generations (Scott, 2010). They often experience higher levels of environmental contamination as a consequence of histories of colonialism, and must contend with contamination of traditional foods such as game and fish along with food insecurity as a consequence of poverty (Hlimi et al., 2012).

Environmental justice and reproductive justice struggles converge for many communities (Hoover et al., 2012). In assessing the potential risks from endocrine disruptors like BFRs and phthalates we must ask whose reproduction is currently valued and whose is not. As the reproductive justice movement has pointed out, systems of oppression have often drastically restricted reproductive choices for poor, racialised and disabled women, as well as queer and trans individuals (Nelson, 2003). Intersectionality demands that we consider the insights of both the environmental justice and the reproductive justice movements, developing broader coalitions in developing ethical and political responses to endocrine disruptors like BFRs and phthalates, while rejecting normative, medicalised understandings of bodies that have been extensively criticised by disability rights and queer ecology.

Disability rights activists and scholars have argued that the medical model of disability should be replaced by a social model in which disability is understood as a form of oppression. People with disabilities are ‘oppressed by society’s failure to provide adequately for their needs, not simply on an individual basis but as a consequence of social organisation which systematically discriminates against them as a group’ (Price and Shildrick, 1998: 227). However, Price and Shildrick (2012) move beyond the social model, to destabilise the normative binary categories of disabled/non-disabled. As they argue, this deconstruction is necessary in order to conceptualise difference as irreducible and multiple and concomitantly render the categories of disability and ability as inherently unstable and porous, because the spectre of one continuously resides in the other. The uncertainty of the effects of endocrine disruptors, and the invisibility of some of those effects until attempts to reproduce expose them, illustrate this destabilisation. As Einstein and Shildrick (2009) argue, a postmodern feminist account of health must include an understanding of bodies in context, an epistemology of ignorance¹ and an openness to the risk of the unknown. The critical disability movement has unsettled binaries between disabled/non-disabled, arguing that we are all at least potentially disabled. In the context of emerging research on endocrine disruptors such as BFRs and phthalates, we see that this potential disability is also intergenerational, since it is not yet possible to know how future individuals will be affected by chemical exposures.

Endocrine disruptors are widely portrayed as producing ‘abnormalities’ in the sexual differentiation of women and men, resulting in a kind of ‘sex panic’ tied to fears of widespread feminisation (Roberts, 2003, 2007). Various feminist and queer scholars argue that claims about the dangers of endocrine disruption are heteronormative since they treat heterosexuality and binary sexual difference as healthy norms (Roberts, 2007: 180; Di Chiro, 2010).

An intergenerational justice framework would attempt to avoid sex panic and heteronormativity. Intergenerational justice is an ethical and political response to threats to survival. Nevertheless, we must not respond by attempting to protect ‘the species’, since, as Elizabeth Grosz (2011) argues, the forces of difference come from within species themselves. Darwinian sexual selection aims at the maximisation of difference, producing excesses in life (Grosz, 2011: 130). Grosz explains that attempts to ensure the future of human reproduction by protecting normative ideals of bodies, genders and sexuality misunderstand Darwin in conflating natural and sexual selection, making the same error as sociobiologists (128–133). While natural selection regulates sexual difference through reproduction, Grosz explains that sexual selection is about erotic intensification, inducing ‘pleasure rather than progeny’ (130). She asserts that ‘[s]exual selection may be understood as the queering of natural selection, that is, the rendering of any biological norms, ideals of fitness, strange, incalculable, excessive’ (132).

Such a concept of becoming provides an answer to queer critiques of ‘econormativity’, since Grosz’s conception of sexual difference is not based on any hierarchy of the sexes, but in contending the incommensurability of the male and the female it insists on the plurality of life and its potential possibilities of dispersion. Grosz upholds the importance of sexual difference, since without ‘the indeterminable difference between two beings who do not yet exist, who are in the process of becoming’ (146), there would be nothing but an asexual reproduction of the same. Nevertheless, the biological mixing of two sexes is capable of infinitely multiplying differences. Nature has an unlimited biological capacity for novel generation, according to Grosz, extending into the new and the unforeseeable (33). Life is the ‘ever more complex elaboration of difference’ (3). Drawing on Grosz, we ask how we can understand intergenerational justice as a way of holding open future possibilities in order to promote positive becoming, exploring ‘how becomings undo the stabilities of identity, knowledge, location, and being, and how they elaborate new directions and new forces that emerge from these processes of destabilization’ (3).

Myra Hird (2012) extends Grosz’s analysis of sexual difference beyond binaries, proposing metabolism as a way to conceptualise difference as ontology, substituting for sexual difference. Arguing that Grosz’s focus on sexual difference risks heteronormativity and anthropocentrism, Hird uses metabolism, since it is the means by which organisms maintain, change and grow, and is carried out by all organisms, where sexual reproduction is limited to a minority of organisms.

Disability rights and queer ecology share a critique of econormative conceptions of bodies, which should be considered in relation to the potential harms resulting from exposures to endocrine disruptors. Similar to the disability rights argument that we are all at least potentially disabled, Alison Kafer argues that we need to recognise that we are all affected by toxic pollution, not only those who have diagnosed effects from chemical exposures (2013: 158–159). Extending Di Chiro’s critique of heteronormative ‘sex panic’ arising from endocrine disruptors, Kafer argues that we can critique the disability fear in these discourses along with the queer fear, in an attempt to ensure that ‘descriptions of the possible impairments linked to toxic exposures do not replicate ableist language and assumptions’ (159).

Instead of succumbing to econormative sex panic, Bailey Kier (2010) argues that we can queer reproduction through recognising our shared interdependent transsex, collapsing the boundaries between human and nonhuman forms of reproduction, in order to see how all bodies exist in ongoing processes of change in relation to other bodies. Kier notes that in the case of intersex fish, we do not know whether the ability of these fish to change sex due to exposure to endocrine disruptors represents a sign of resilience or a defect (2010: 310). In this argument, toxins and toxicity are productive, as well as uncontainable (Chen, 2012). Rather than denying queer toxicity, we can instead explore the anxieties that produce it and how it challenges distinctions between bodies that are living and dead, pure and contaminated (Chen, 2012). Trans-becoming may be understood as ‘an emergence of a material, psychical, sensual, and social self through corporeal, spatial, and temporal processes that transform the lived body’ (Hayward, 2010: 226). Replacing sex panic and fears of ‘feminisation’, non-binary, constantly changing sexual difference may be understood as representing adaptation in the context of ubiquitous pollution, even as we respond to harms such as cancer and other forms of suffering resulting from exposure to endocrine disruptors.

Although synthetic endocrine disrupters may affect biological variation, they do not create it (Langston, 2010: 144); sexual difference is already widely variable and confounds binaries (Hird, 2004). Therefore, environmentalism must not rely on a heteronormative, ableist conception of the ‘healthy body’. Instead, we must ask how we can ‘develop a more proactive (rather than polluted) politics that argues for the integrity, security, and health of bodies, homes, families, and communities without reproducing the eugenics discourse of the “normal/natural”’ (Di Chiro, 2010: 210). Addressing the potential harms posed by endocrine disruptors such as BFRs and phthalates must avoid relying on sensationalistic appeals to the normal or natural body as being under attack. As Ah-King and Hayward argue, responding to the risks of endocrine disruptors requires a politics of resilience that recognises toxicity without reasserting a politics of purity, placing pollution-caused sexual changes in the context of a conception of sex as an ongoing process of change and becoming (2014). Queer ecology demands ‘both seeing beauty in the wounds of the world and taking responsibility to care for the world as it is’ (Mortimer-Sandilands, 2005: 24).

Imagining future difference

The inability to properly consider the needs of future generations constitutes ‘moral corruption’ (Gardiner 2006). This failure of ethical imagination is a product of an understanding of time as linear and individual, a conception which Bryson argues is challenged by reproduction: ‘At an abstract level, childbirth both generates time for the child that is born and links each mother to the continuing reproduction of the species. As such, it may also challenge her sense of individual time and autonomy and provide a source of temporal understanding that goes beyond linearity’ (2007: 127).

Intergenerational justice is not only about responsibility to future persons, however; it also involves determining what the polity of the future will look like through deciding who will become a future citizen. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality, responsibility to future generations can be grounded in birth as an opening to difference. Arendt asserts that the ‘miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, “natural” ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born’ (1998: 247). Natality goes beyond biological reproduction to include the development of new future political communities. Natality is both natural and social and thus contests the delegation of reproduction to the private sphere of life. It also challenges linear, individual notions of time that undermine an ethics of intergenerational justice. Arendt’s conception of natality offers a way of understanding responsibility to future generations without foreclosing on who those future people may be, thereby avoiding the ‘econormativity’ that queer theorists and critical disability theorists criticise. Arendt also avoids gender essentialism since she does not limit natality to women.

When considering the future in terms of reproduction, discussions of intergenerational justice must take into account queer accounts of futurity that challenge reproduction as imperative. Queer theorists have critiqued what Lee Edelman (2004) calls ‘reproductive futurism’, the imperative to reproduce in order to promote a positive conception of the future. J. Jack Halberstam (2005) argues for a distinct ‘queer temporality’, given that the queer life narrative has a different trajectory, putting it outside heterosexual, heteronormative, reproductive time. Halberstam describes queer time as involving an urgent attention to the present and a deep recognition of death and illness as a consequence of the AIDS crisis, as well as often operating outside mainstream temporalities of productive labour, marriage and reproduction.

Alison Kafer builds on Edelman’s critique of reproductive futurism, arguing that the idealised figure of the child it relies upon draws upon anxieties about disability (2013: 29). Kafer also argues that a focus on a deferred future in which ‘cures’ can be found deflects attention from the present needs of disabled people, and that concerns for the future have motivated eugenicist practices. But against Edelman, Kafer argues that instead of refusing the future we should attempt to imagine the future differently, in ways that include disabled people and members of other oppressed groups (such as people of colour, the poor and queer and trans individuals).

Kafer’s intersectional feminist-queer-crip approach refuses the ‘grim imagined futures’ associated with disabled bodies, and instead moves towards an optimistic futurity that thinks imagined futures differently. In contrast to the elision of disability in many ecofeminist discourses, she describes how artists and activists such as Eli Clare and Riva Lehrer ‘are imagining and embodying new understandings of environmentalism that take disability experiences seriously, as sites of knowledge production about nature. Their future visions, because grounded in present crip communities, recognise disability experiences and human limitations as essential, not marginal or tangential, to questions about “nature” and environmental movements’ (148). Kafer argues for the value of a future that includes persons with disabilities and for the political nature of disability as a category that can be contested. However, Kafer recognises that actively or negligently causing disability is not something anyone wants – even she does not desire to be more disabled than she already is (though she recognises the ‘ableist failure of imagination’ in this position) (4). She acknowledges that disability and impairment should be avoided and prevented through access to health care, safe working conditions and public health measures, but nevertheless she argues that disability is part of what makes us human. We must recognise culpability on the part of chemical producers and state regulators for future harms resulting from exposure to these chemicals, and fight to prevent them from taking place, while at the same time making space for different forms of embodiment and challenging oppression associated with those differences. An intersectional intergenerational justice response to endocrine disruptors will need to address the health care needs of those impacted in the future, without retrenching existing inequalities of the distribution of care work.

The interactions between endocrine disruptors, bodies and environments will produce a range of effects, which we are only beginning to understand. Ethical responsibility to future generations must be grounded in an openness to change and difference, through which we can develop an understanding of intergenerational justice that disrupts notions of unified, abstract selfhood and that instead recognises a responsibility to protect difference across and within generations. We need to attempt to minimise the suffering of future generations, while also welcoming the unknown, that which confounds expectations, and without marginalising those future persons who do not conform to existing norms of embodied difference.

Promoting increased capacities for all should be the criterion for intergenerational justice, not ensuring continued conformity with existing categories of life. Since it is impossible to know in advance what the difference of the future will look like, imagination is necessary in order to respond ethically and politically to the threats to future generations; as well as providing continuous witness to how difference contributes to the fullness of life.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by grants RHF-100625 and RHF-100626 from the Institute for Human Development, Child and Youth Health (IHDCYH), Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).

Note

References

Abbey, Ruth (ed) (2013) Feminist Interpretations of John Rawls. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.

Ah-King, Malin and Eve Hayward (2014) ‘Toxic Sexes: Perverting Pollution and Queering Hormone Disruption’. O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies, 1: 2–12.

Alaimo, Stacy (2010) Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press.

Albert, Océane and Bernard Jégou (2014) ‘A Critical Assessment of the Endocrine Susceptibility of the Human Testis to Phthalates from Fetal Life to Adulthood’. Human Reproduction Update, 20(2): 231–249.

Anstey, Erica Hesch (2009) ‘Contaminating the Hallowed Maternal Body: A Feminist Approach to the Dilemma of Endocrine Disruptors on Maternal and Child Health’. Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering, 11(1): 167–179.

Arendt, Hannah (1998) The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Armstrong, Alicia Brooks and James H. Segars (2013) ‘Correcting Reproductive Health Disparities in Women: An Opportunity to Improve the Health of Future Generations’. Seminars in Reproductive Medicine, 31(5): 313–316.

Barnes, Liberty Walther (2014) Conceiving Masculinity: Male Infertility, Medicine, and Identity. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Beasley, Chris and Carol Bacchi (2007) ‘Envisaging a New Politics for an Ethical Future’. Feminist Theory, 8(3): 279–298.

10.

Birke, Lynda (2000) ‘Sitting on the Fence: Biology, Feminism and Gender-Bending Environments’. Women’s Studies International Forum, 23(5): 587–599.

11.

Birke, Lynda (2003) ‘Shaping Biology: Feminism and the Idea of “the Biological”’. In: Simon J. Williams, Lynda A. Birke and Gillian Bendelow (eds) Debating Biology: Sociological Reflections on Health, Medicine and Society. London: Routledge, pp. 39–52.

12.

Braidotti, Rosi (2002) Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. 1st edn. Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity.

13.

Bryson, Valerie (2007) Gender and the Politics of Time: Feminist Theory and Contemporary Debates. Bristol: Policy.

14.

Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.

15.

Butler, Judith (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. Abingdon; New York, NY: Routledge.

16.

Cairns Kate, Josée Johnston and Norah MacKendrick (2013) ‘Feeding the “Organic Child”: Mothering Through Ethical Consumption’. Journal of Consumer Culture, 13(2): 97–118.

17.

Casals-Casas, Cristina and Béatrice Desvergne (2011) ‘Endocrine Disruptors: From Endocrine to Metabolic Disruption’. Annual Review of Physiology, 73(1): 135–162.

18.

Chen, Mel Y. (2012) Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

19.

Cole, Luke and Sheila R. Foster (2001) From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement. New York: NYU Press.

20.

Conrad, Peter (2007) The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders. 1st edn. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

21.

Cutter, Susan (2006) Hazards Vulnerability and Environmental Justice. Abingdon; New York: Earthscan.

22.

Daniels, Cynthia R. (2006) Exposing Men: The Science and Politics of Male Reproduction. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

23.

Di Chiro, Giovanna (2010) ‘Polluted Politics? Confronting Toxic Discourse, Sex Panic, and Eco-Normativity’. In: Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson (eds) Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 199–230.

24.

Downie, Jocelyn and Jennifer J. Llewellyn (2011) Being Relational: Reflections on Relational Theory and Health Law. Vancouver: UBC Press.

25.

Edelman, Lee (2004) No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

26.

Einstein, Gillian and Margrit Shildrick (2009) ‘The Postconventional Body: Retheorising Women’s Health’. Social Science & Medicine, 69(2): 293–300.

27.

Feder, Ellen K. (2009) ‘Imperatives of Normality From “Intersex” to “Disorders of Sex Development”’. GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 15(2): 225–247.

28.

Gaard, Greta (2010) ‘Reproductive Technology, or Reproductive Justice? An Ecofeminist, Environmental Justice Perspective on the Rhetoric of Choice’. Ethics & the Environment, 15(2): 103–129.

29.

Gardiner, Stephen M. (2006) ‘Protecting Future Generations: Intergenerational Buck-Passing, Theoretical Ineptitude and a Brief for a Global Core Precautionary Principle’. In: Jörg Tremmel (ed) Handbook of Intergenerational Justice. Cheltenham; Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, pp. 148–169.

30.

Gee, Gilbert C. and Devon C. Payne-Sturges (2004) ‘Environmental Health Disparities: A Framework Integrating Psychosocial and Environmental Concepts’. Environmental Health Perspectives, 112(17): 1645–1653.

31.

Grindler, Natalia M., Jenifer E. Allsworth, George A. Macones, Kurunthachalam Kannan et al. (2015) ‘Persistent Organic Pollutants and Early Menopause in U.S. Women’. PLoS ONE 10(1): e0116057.

32.

Grosz, Elizabeth A. (1994) Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

33.

Grosz, Elizabeth A. (2011) Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

34.

Halberstam, J. Jack (2005) In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press.

35.

Halden, R. U. (2010) ‘Plastics and Health Risks’. Annual Review of Public Health, 31(1): 179–194.

36.

Haraway, Donna (2003) The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press.

37.

Haraway, Donna (2007) When Species Meet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

38.

Haraway, Donna (2012) ‘Awash in Urine: DES and Premarin® in Multispecies Response-ability’. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 40(1/2): 301–316.

39.

Hays, Sharon (1998) The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press.

40.

Hayward, Eva (2010) ‘Spider City Sex’. Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 20: 225–251.

41.

Hessler, Kristen (2013) ‘Epigenetic Inheritance and the Moral Responsibilities of Mothers’. Virtual Mentor, 15(9): 767–770.

42.

Hird, Myra J. (2004) ‘Naturally Queer’. Feminist Theory 5(1): 85–89.

43.

Hird, Myra J. (2012) ‘Digesting Difference: Metabolism and the Question of Sexual Difference’. Configurations, 20: 213–237.

44.

Hird, Myra J. (2013) ‘Waste, Landfills, and an Environmental Ethic of Vulnerability’. Ethics and the Environment, 18: 105–124.

45.

Hlimi, Tina, Kelly Skinner, Rhona M. Hanning, Ian D. Martin et al. (2012) ‘Traditional Food Consumption Behaviour and Concern with Environmental Contaminants Among Cree Schoolchildren of the Mushkegowuk Territory’. International Journal of Circumpolar Health, 71: doi:10.3402/ijch.v71i0.17344.

46.

Hoover, Elizabeth, Katsi Cook, Ron Plain, Kathy Sanchez et al. (2012) ‘Indigenous Peoples of North America: Environmental Exposures and Reproductive Justice’. Environmental Health Perspectives, 120: 1645–1649.

47.

Kafer, Alison (2013) Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

48.

Kevles, Daniel J. (1999) ‘Eugenics and Human Rights’. British Medical Journal, 319(7207): 435–438.

49.

Kier, Bailey (2010) ‘Interdependent Ecological Transsex: Notes on Re/Production, “Transgender” Fish, and the Management of Populations, Species, and Resources’. Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 20(3): 299–319.

50.

Kortenkamp, Andreas (2010) ‘Combined Exposures to Anti-Androgenic Chemicals: Steps Towards Cumulative Risk Assessment’. International Journal of Andrology, 33(2): 463–474.

51.

Kukla, Rebecca (2008) ‘Measuring Mothering’. International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, 1(1): 67–90.

52.

Langston, Nancy (2010) Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

53.

Lottrup, G. (2006) ‘Possible Impact of Phthalates on Infant Reproductive Health’. International Journal of Andrology, 29(1): 172–180.

54.

MacGregor, Sherilyn (2006) Beyond Mothering Earth: Ecological Citizenship and the Politics of Care. Vancouver: UBC Press.

55.

MacKendrick, Norah (2010) ‘Media Framing of Body Burdens: Precautionary Consumption and the Individualization of Risk’. Sociological Inquiry, 80(1): 126–149.

56.

MacKendrick, Norah (2011) ‘The Individualization of Risk as Responsibility and Citizenship: A Case Study of Chemical Body Burdens’. PhD thesis, University of Toronto, Canada.

57.

Mackendrick, Norah (2014) ‘More Work for Mother Chemical Body Burdens as a Maternal Responsibility’. Gender and Society, 28(5): 705–728.

58.

Mackenzie, Catriona and Nadia Stoljar N (2000) Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Automony, Agency, and the Social Self. New York: Oxford University Press.

59.

Mackenzie, Catriona, Wendy Rogers and Susan Dodds (eds) (2013) Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

60.

Mackenzie, Constanze A., Ada Lockridge and Margaret Keith (2005) ‘Declining Sex Ratio in a First Nation Community’. Environmental Health Perspectives, 113(10): 1295–1298.

61.

Martino-Andrade, Anderson J., Rosana N. Morals, Giuliana G. K. Botelho, Graziela Muller et al. (2009) ‘Coadministration of Active Phthalates Results in Disruption of Foetal Testicular Function in Rats’. International Journal of Andrology, 32(6): 704–712.

62.

Morales-Suárez-Varela, Maria, Gunnar V. Toft, Morten S. Jensen, Cecilia Ramlau-Hansen et al. (2011) ‘Parental Occupational Exposure to Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals and Male Genital Malformations: A Study in the Danish National Birth Cohort Study’. Environmental Health, 10(1): 3.

63.

Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona (2005) ‘Unnatural Passions? Toward a Queer Ecology’. Invisible Culture 9. Available at: www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/ivchome.htm (accessed 5 May 2017).

64.

Nelson, Jennifer (2003) Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement. New York: NYU Press.

65.

Peltier, Morgan R., Hschi-Chi Koo, Darios Getahun and Ramkumar Menon (2015) ‘Does Exposure to Flame Retardants Increase the Risk for Preterm Birth?’ Journal of Reproductive Immunology, 107: 20–25.

66.

Perera, Frederica P. and Julie Herbstman (2011) ‘Prenatal Environmental Exposures, Epigenetics, and Disease’. Reproductive Toxicology, 31(3): 363–373.

67.

Price, Janet and Margrit Shildrick (1998) ‘Uncertain Thoughts on the Dis/abled Body’. In: Margrit Shildrick and Janet Price (eds) Vital Signs: Feminist Reconfigurations of the Bio/logical Body. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 224–249.

68.

Rider, Cynthia V., Jonathan R. Furr, Vickie S. Wilson and L. Earl Gray (2010) ‘Cumulative Effects of in Utero Administration of Mixtures of Reproductive Toxicants That Disrupt Common Target Tissues via Diverse Mechanisms of Toxicity’. International Journal of Andrology, 33(2): 443–462.

69.

Rissman, Emilie F. and Mazhar Adli (2014) ‘Minireview: Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: Focus on Endocrine Disrupting Compounds’. Endocrinology, 155(8): 2770–2780.

70.

Roberts, Celia (2003) ‘Drowning in a Sea of Estrogens: Sex Hormones, Sexual Reproduction and Sex’. Sexualities, 6(2): 195–213.

71.

Roberts, Celia (2007) Messengers of Sex: Hormones, Biomedicine and Feminism. New York: Cambridge University Press.

72.

Sathyanarayana, Sheela, Garry Alcedo, Brian Saelens, Chuan Zhou et al. (2013) ‘Unexpected Results in a Randomized Dietary Trial to Reduce Phthalate and Bisphenol A Exposures’. Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology, 23(4): 378–384.

73.

Schecter, Arnold, Darah Haffner, Justin A. Colacino, Keyur Patel et al. (2010) ‘Polybrominated Diphenyl Ethers (PBDEs) and Hexabromocyclodecane (HBCD) in Composite U.S. Food Samples’. Environmental Health Perspectives, 118(3): 357–362.

74.

Scott, Dayna Nadine (2009) ‘“Gender-benders”: Sex and Law in the Constitution of Polluted Bodies’. Feminist Legal Studies, 17: 241–265.

75.

Scott, Dayna Nadine (2010) ‘Body Polluted: Questions of Scale, Gender and Remedy’. Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, 44: 121–156.

76.

Serrano, Samantha E., Joseph Braun, Leonardo Trasande, Russell Dills et al. (2014) ‘Phthalates and Diet: A Review of the Food Monitoring and Epidemiology Data’. Environmental Health, 13(1): 43–57.

77.

Sharpe, Richard M. and David Stewart Irvine (2004) ‘How Strong Is the Evidence of a Link Between Environmental Chemicals and Adverse Effects on Human Reproductive Health?’ BMJ: British Medical Journal, 328(7437): 447–451.

78.

Sheldon, Sally (1999) ‘ReConceiving Masculinity: Imagining Men’s Reproductive Bodies in Law’. Journal of Law and Society, 26(2): 129–149.

79.

Shildrick, Margrit (2002) Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self. London: SAGE.

80.

Silvers, Anita (2000) ‘Aging Fairly: Feminist and Disability Perspectives on Intergenerational Justice’. In: Margaret Urban Walker (ed) Mother Time: Women, Aging, and Ethics. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 203–226.

81.

Small, Chanley M., Deanna Murray, Metrecia Terrell and Michele Marcus (2011) ‘Reproductive Outcomes Among Women Exposed to a Brominated Flame Retardant in Utero’. Archives of Environmental & Occupational Health, 66(4): 201–208.

82.

Stapleton, Heather M., Sarah Eagle, Andreas Sjödin and Thomas F. Webster (2012) ‘Serum PBDEs in a North Carolina Toddler Cohort: Associations with Handwipes, House Dust, and Socioeconomic Variables’. Environmental Health Perspectives, 120(7): 1049–1054.

83.

Szasz, Andrew (2007) Shopping Our Way to Safety: How We Changed from Protecting the Environment to Protecting Ourselves. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

84.

Sze, Julie (2007) Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice. New York: MIT Press.

85.

Trasande, Leonardo, Teresa M. Attina, Sheela Sathyanarayana, Adam J. Spanier et al. (2013) ‘Race/Ethnicity-Specific Associations of Urinary Phthalates with Childhood Body Mass in a Nationally Representative Sample’. Environmental Health Perspectives, 121(4): 501–506.

86.

Tuana, Nancy (2006) ‘The Speculum of Ignorance: The Women’s Health Movement and Epistemologies of Ignorance’. Hypatia, 21: 1–19.

87.

Tyrrell, Jessica, David Melzer, William Henley, Tamara S. Galloway et al. (2013) ‘Associations Between Socioeconomic Status and Environmental Toxicant Concentrations in Adults in the USA: NHANES 2001–2010’. Environment International, 59: 328–335.

88.

Vandenberg, Laura N., Theo Colborn, Tyrone B. Hayes, Jerrold J. Heindel et al. (2012) ‘Hormones and Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals: Low-Dose Effects and Nonmonotonic Dose Responses’. Endocrine Reviews, 33(3): 378–455.

89.

Victor, Elizabeth and Laura Guidry-Grimes (2014) ‘The Persistence of Agency Through Social Institutions and Caring for Future Generations’. International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, 7(1): 122–141.

90.

Weuve, Jennifer, Russ Hauser, Antonia M. Calafat, Stacey A. Missmer et al. (2010) ‘Association of Exposure to Phthalates with Endometriosis and Uterine Leiomyomata: Findings from NHANES, 1999–2004’. Environmental Health Perspectives, 118(6): 825–832.

91.

Wittassek, M. (2008) ‘Phthalates: Metabolism and Exposure’. International Journal of Andrology, 31(2): 131–138.

92.

Wolff, Mary S., Susan L. Teitelbaum, Gayle Windham, Susan M. Pinney et al. (2007) ‘Pilot Study of Urinary Biomarkers of Phytoestrogens, Phthalates, and Phenols in Girls’. Environmental Health Perspectives, 115(1): 116–121.

93.

Woolley, Frances (2000) ‘Degrees of Connection: A Critique of Rawls’s Theory of Mutual Disinterest’. Feminist Economics, 6(2): 1–21.

94.

Young, Iris Marion (2011) Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

95.

Zoeller, R. Thomas, Terry Ray Brown, Loretta L. Doan, Andrea C. Gore et al. (2012) ‘Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals and Public Health Protection: A Statement of Principles from The Endocrine Society’. Endocrinology, 153(9): 4097–4110.

96.

Zota, Ami R., Gary Adamkiewicz and Rachel A. Morello-Frosch (2010) ‘Are PBDEs an Environmental Equity Concern? Exposure Disparities by Socioeconomic Status’. Environmental Science & Technology, 44(15): 5691–5692.