Paper short abstract:

Emerging from art-anthropological fieldwork in post-disaster, post-nuclear Japan, this paper will consider the porosity of bodies and boundaries, and other socio-material-entanglements, through forms of radiation protection, and in light of feminist theories.

Paper long abstract:

This paper emerged from ongoing interdisciplinary anthropological and artistic practice - responses to the post-disaster context in Japan following the earthquake, tsunami and radiation 'accident' in 2011. It will reflect on the porosity of bodies and boundaries, and other material-entanglements, through forms of radiation 'protection'.

Conflict between 'expert' science and 'citizen' science highlights how active questioning of nuclear effects, of what can be known, has been criticised, even leading to the pathologisation of (women's) anxiety. Despite entrenched gender roles, women have engaged in collective actions, yet the body, their bodies and the bodies of their families, are porous sites of struggle on many levels. Radiation pollution alters human bodies - and probably all organic substances - at a cellular level. Experiments in 'protection' range from the talismanic to active bacterial cultures, to inorganic matter (e.g. derivatives of boron, with the capacity to act as a buffer between flesh and radioactively polluted environments, but which is also toxic to fertility). These relations, or buffers, may be 'real', anticipated, or merely optimistic. My aim here is not to reproduce what Latour has called 'body talk' (2004), but to materially explore the idea that bodies do not end with our skin (Mol 2002). I will draw on feminist theories (including Donna Haraway and Karen Barad) to consider larger questions about responsibility and accountability, as well as how these entanglements of body-matters in a post-nuclear ecology might be thought of ecologically, in multiple ways.