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Short abstract:

This paper complicates common temporal narratives of pollution — momentary disruption or crisis, or indefinite forever — by interrogating a reverence to life implicit in both. It combines anticolonial, queer, and crip notions of toxicity and chronicity to offer a different, non-animate approach.

Long abstract:

This project complicates notions of disruption — a momentary crisis of bodily flux — in the context of pollution from per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). Popularly known as “forever chemicals” due to their bioaccumulative nature, PFAS are hormonally-active pollutants, or Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals (EDCs). Alongside anticolonial work on toxicants as ongoing settler-colonial infrastructures (Liboiron, 2021; Shadaan & Murphy, 2020), attention to PFAS brings me to ask: How can we conceive of relations with toxicants as simultaneously in-crisis (disruption) and already/indefinitely polluted (forever)? How are these seemingly disparate timescapes produced, and what alternative might help us reckon with our unique relationships to precarity and complicity in our variable chemical kinships (Balayannis & Garnett, 2020)?

I follow scholarly traditions pollution to slow violence (Davis, 2015; Liboiron et al., 2018; Nixon, 2011), joining these conversations with those attending more closely to queer environmentalisms (Ah-King & Hayward, 2013; Di Chiro, 2010) and crip time (Kafer, 2013; Krebs, 2022). I suggest this emerging discourse maintains a reverence to life that animates (Chen, 2012) pollution’s temporality. Then, I consider the implications of instead choosing non-life (Povinelli, 2016; TallBear, 2017) as a temporal underpinning, such that chemical kinships become not simply “experiments of living with pollution,” but of unanxious worldmaking that are not beholden to a biopolitical, or necropolitical, scaffold. With attention to the ways colonialism already doesn’t guarantee “life” as a universal condition, I ultimately suggest Murphy’s alterlife might be amended to alterbeing for our emergent toxic relations “here in the damage now” (2017, p. 501).