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Article Excerpt
How might one properly represent a toxin or infectious agent, and what directives inform that propriety? How might toxins take on characteristics well beyond their physical properties? This essay meditates on extended meanings of toxicity, using the 2007 U.S. case of "lead panic" about toxic toys associated with China. I label the lead case a panic to indicate its disproportionate status among cases of domestic intoxication, threats to children's health, and the relative paucity of evidence that the contaminated toys themselves had caused severe health consequences. (1) I further measure this panic against intriguingly parallel spectacles in early-twentieth-century fiction and film in the United States to investigate lead's role in the complex play of durative sovereign fantasy; sovereign fantasy is defined here as the national or imperial project of absolute rule and authority. I focus on the notion that an inanimate but invasive entity such as lead can become racialized, even as it can only lie in notionally peripheral relation to biological life units. Rather than focus on the concrete dangers to living bodies of environmental lead, which are ever more present and material and are well documented, in this essay I wish to think about lead as a cultural phenomenon over and above its material and physiomedical character. Along the way, I wish to ask these questions: If lead is now imagined to come from places strictly outside the geographic West-in spite of the longtime complexity of transnational relations--and hereby threaten definitive United States/"Western" citizenry, then how might we assess its status against a history of race rendered as biological threat and within a present that considers the possibilities of biological terrorism? How might we contextualize the panic around lead in terms of a hyperstimulated war machine in which the U.S. government perceives and surveils increasing numbers of imagined terrorists? And how does a context of increasingly fragile U.S. global economic power condition this panic?
In the summer of 2007 in the United States, a spate of warnings and recalls of preschool toys, pet food, seafood, lunchboxes, and other items began to appear in national and local newspapers and television and radio news. Descriptions of the items recalled tended to have three common characteristics. First, they pointed to the dangers of lead intoxication as opposed to other toxins. Second, they emphasized the vulnerability of American children to this toxin. Third, they had a common point of origination: China, for decades a major supplier of consumer products to the United States and responsible for various stages in the production stream. These alerts arose from direct testing of the toys, rather than from medical reports of children's intoxication by lead content in the indicated toys. One of the more prominent visual symbols of this recall debacle appearing in newspapers and websites was the series of images of Mattel brand Thomas & Friends series of toy trains, all smiling, in different colors and identities, sometimes graphically headed off the tracks. Mattel is a U.S.-based corporation with heavy use of transnational labor, but it was the Chinese source of lead that received the most attention. Other images specific to lead-tainted toys abounded: soft plush toys, plastic charms, necklaces and bracelets, teething aids, Chinese workers either solitary or in tens of seated factory rows painting trains and other objects, toy medical accessories like toy blood pressure cuffs. Pictures of the toys alternated with images of overwhelmingly white children playing with the suspect toys. Painted and plastic toys' lead toxicity became the newest addition to the mainstream U.S. parental (in)security map. Despite earlier, serious intimations of toxic exposure, lead has only now so sturdily enjoyed the status of quick reference.
While notions of lead circulated prolifically, in fact no industrial forms of lead were shown in raw form, no molecular structure of lead was illustrated. Rather, images of the suspect toys, and the children playing with them predominated in visual representations of the toxic threat. Even the feared image of a sick American child that underlay the lead panic was not visually shown, only discussed in text as a threatening possibility. Together, the associative panoply of images-the florid, primary color toys associated with domestic, childlike innocence and security--served as a contrastive indictment. The ensemble of images seemed to accelerate the explosive construction of a master toxicity narrative about Chinese products in general, one that had been quietly simmering since the 2005 recalls of Chinese--made soft lunchboxes tainted with dangerous levels of lead. (2) Inanimate pollutants could now "invade" all kinds of consumer products, and other pollutants could always climb aboard. Other countries were named in relation to manufacturing hazards; yet, perhaps in proportion to its predominance in world markets, China remained the focus of concern for U.S. vulnerability to consumer-product toxicities. Alarm about the safety of Chinese products entered all form of discourse, from casual conversations to talk shows to news reports. U.S. citizens were urged to avoid buying Chinese products in general, even though this was quite impossible in view of how entrenched U.S.-China trade and manufacturing relations had become.
At the same time, one of the sustained concerns of environmental justice activists that did receive minor media coverage among U.S. liberal interests--the effect of lead paint on children in impoverished neighborhoods and the greater levels of lead toxicity among black children--began to float and fade, become unhinged by the heightened transnational significance of lead. In some sense, lead was, despite its physiological identity, taking on a new meaning and political character. Why were painted trains and beaming middle-class white children the only way journalistically to represent something so tiny it couldn't be witnessed in action by the human eye? How did racial polarities snap so neatly into place such that white children were the primary victims of this environmental lead, when it was black children who had previously been represented in relation to the dangers of environmental lead? Why could only China, or occasionally a few other non-U.S. industrial sites such as Mexico and India, be imagined as lead's source? Ultimately, who, and what, had this new lead become?
Live and Dead Contaminants and Modern Transitivity
At first glance, lead is not integral to the biological or social body, and this seems particularly true of the social body that constitutes Western imperialism. In the biomythography of the West, lead is "dead." Rather than being imagined as integral to life, lead notionally lies in marginal/exterior and instrumental/impactful relation to biological life units, such as organic bodies or social units. Although lead is a commonly understood pollutant, long associated with industrial purposes and targeted in environmentalist efforts, today's lead might first suggest a new development specifically in...
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