Periodic Reporting for period 1 - BirthControlEnvirons (Contraception meets the environment: everyday contraceptive practices, politics, and futures in a toxic age)
Berichtszeitraum: 2019-04-15 bis 2021-04-14
Young women in France are increasingly turning away from ‘the pill’ for contraception. This shift is packed with meaning: it signals a crisis for the contraceptive method that has
been the bedrock of French family planning for more than fifty years, the access to which is still collectively imagined as an emblematic victory of the second wave feminist movement. But also, and most critically, it draws attention to a morphing contraceptive landscape that is less reliant on synthetic hormones. Although not yet properly studied from a qualitative point of view, a few reasons had been suggested for the pill’s loss of popularity, including the growing number of women who oppose the use of the pill due to ‘environmental reasons’ and, more specifically, to concerns with everyday exposure to toxicants. In order to further explore this issue, the main objective of this project was to learn how young women striving for chemical-free contraception negotiate feminist and environmental sensibilities with regards to their contraceptive choices. The research took place in urban France. Three specific objectives were designed to pursue the main one: the first had to do with how this negotiation took place in everyday practices, the second one at the level of political action and the third one entailed the experimental exploration of the intersections of chemical pollution, fertility and the future, through the making a of a short documentary.
This project aimed at illuminating three highly relevant issues in contemporary French society: how young people are apprehending and, more than ever, contesting environmental toxicity; the unprecedented change in the perception and use of the contraceptive pill; and how newer, and still understudied, local forms of feminism are mobilizing around the present and future relationship between synthetic hormones and female bodies in an increasingly toxic age. Ultimately, project results help refine our understanding of how the environmental crisis is shaping all aspects of social life, including sexual and reproductive ones.
been the bedrock of French family planning for more than fifty years, the access to which is still collectively imagined as an emblematic victory of the second wave feminist movement. But also, and most critically, it draws attention to a morphing contraceptive landscape that is less reliant on synthetic hormones. Although not yet properly studied from a qualitative point of view, a few reasons had been suggested for the pill’s loss of popularity, including the growing number of women who oppose the use of the pill due to ‘environmental reasons’ and, more specifically, to concerns with everyday exposure to toxicants. In order to further explore this issue, the main objective of this project was to learn how young women striving for chemical-free contraception negotiate feminist and environmental sensibilities with regards to their contraceptive choices. The research took place in urban France. Three specific objectives were designed to pursue the main one: the first had to do with how this negotiation took place in everyday practices, the second one at the level of political action and the third one entailed the experimental exploration of the intersections of chemical pollution, fertility and the future, through the making a of a short documentary.
This project aimed at illuminating three highly relevant issues in contemporary French society: how young people are apprehending and, more than ever, contesting environmental toxicity; the unprecedented change in the perception and use of the contraceptive pill; and how newer, and still understudied, local forms of feminism are mobilizing around the present and future relationship between synthetic hormones and female bodies in an increasingly toxic age. Ultimately, project results help refine our understanding of how the environmental crisis is shaping all aspects of social life, including sexual and reproductive ones.
Project objectives were formulated based on previous research and the incidental observation of significant articulations between concerns with ordinary toxic exposures emanating from products and infrastructures characteristic of industrialized life, namely those involving endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs), and concerns with the long-term intake of synthetic hormones, namely the contraceptive pill. Without assuming that the current disenchantment with the contraceptive pill in France was due solely to this particular articulation, the researcher carried out fieldwork consisting in participant observation in public events where sexual and reproductive health, feminisms and different forms of environmentalism intersected, as well as in-depth interviews with key interlocutors. Eco-feminist events, self-help and auto-gynaecology groups turned out to be key spaces of inquiry, as they represented spaces of contestation of the dominant contraceptive model, in which hormones are deeply engrained from the constitution of the gynaecological profession to the doctor-patient relationship. Two major themes emerged as deeply relevant during the course of this project: The first one concerns the bodily and affective apprehension of everyday toxicity, which in this context is critically attuned to the effects of EDCs and contraceptive hormones. The second is an ontological exploration of hormones and hormone-like chemicals, from a social sciences perspective: taken as objects that do not stays in bodies but circulate into landscapes and other organisms, the boundaries of hormones as objects of inquiry blur, becoming difficult to identify clear-cut distinctions between hormones produced in the body, synthetic hormones, and hormone-like chemicals such as EDCs.
Finally, the third specific objective materialized in a documentary exploring the intersections between toxic chemicals, fertility and the future in what at first seems a somewhat unrelated context but that emerged as a recurrent theme and concern during fieldwork with young feminists: the toxicity of the landscapes they inhabit, and where their personal and political practices take place. The short documentary thus explores the fertility and toxicity of the deeply polluted soil in a brownfield in the Parisian periphery, and the possibility that this soil can sustain new life and projects in the future. Two additional specific objectives were explored in the making of the documentary and accompanying activities, the first one focusing on the possible avenues for transdisciplinary collaboration in anthropology, and the second one on the role of sound and film in anthropology.
This project has had a significant impact in the career of the researcher, who is engaged in various projects to pursue the exploration of issues having to with toxicity, the study of chemicals as ethnographic objects and the everyday apprehension of the environmental crisis. Project insights have and are being shared through articles (published, accepted and under review); book chapters (accepted and to be published during 2021 and 2022); a short documentary film and their screenings; three soundscapes hosted in a radio blog and disseminated as part of a collective residency festival; through the participation of the researcher in three different networks working from an anthropological and transdisciplinary perspective on hormones, hormone-like chemicals and their intersections with environmental and reproductive justice; through social media and a research page.
Finally, the third specific objective materialized in a documentary exploring the intersections between toxic chemicals, fertility and the future in what at first seems a somewhat unrelated context but that emerged as a recurrent theme and concern during fieldwork with young feminists: the toxicity of the landscapes they inhabit, and where their personal and political practices take place. The short documentary thus explores the fertility and toxicity of the deeply polluted soil in a brownfield in the Parisian periphery, and the possibility that this soil can sustain new life and projects in the future. Two additional specific objectives were explored in the making of the documentary and accompanying activities, the first one focusing on the possible avenues for transdisciplinary collaboration in anthropology, and the second one on the role of sound and film in anthropology.
This project has had a significant impact in the career of the researcher, who is engaged in various projects to pursue the exploration of issues having to with toxicity, the study of chemicals as ethnographic objects and the everyday apprehension of the environmental crisis. Project insights have and are being shared through articles (published, accepted and under review); book chapters (accepted and to be published during 2021 and 2022); a short documentary film and their screenings; three soundscapes hosted in a radio blog and disseminated as part of a collective residency festival; through the participation of the researcher in three different networks working from an anthropological and transdisciplinary perspective on hormones, hormone-like chemicals and their intersections with environmental and reproductive justice; through social media and a research page.
Through interventions and articles, the researcher has begun to make a significant contribution to the state-of-the-art body of knowledge on hormones and hormone-like chemicals as ethnographic objects; anthropological and STS understandings of the relationship between chemicals, bodies and landscapes; and the bodily and affective apprehension of toxicity in a permanently, yet unevenly polluted world.
As part of the European New Green Deal, the European Commission has adopted the EU Action Plan: “Towards Zero Pollution for Air, Water and Soil”, which lays out a vision for reducing these kinds of pollution dramatically by 2050. Understanding how European citizens apprehend and act on different kinds of pollution, which is a contribution of the Action, is key for a successful implementation of the plan. Plans that take a fully top-down approach and that do not understand nor are attuned to the needs of the population are usually bound to fail. Also, through the making of the documentary film, which specifically deals with soil pollution and fertility, important questions are raised regarding the challenges, temporality and the very possibility of soil depollution. This film also shows examples of the multiplicity of practices that can be carried out to deal with the pollution of soil in former industrial sites, and head towards the recovery of its fertility.
As part of the European New Green Deal, the European Commission has adopted the EU Action Plan: “Towards Zero Pollution for Air, Water and Soil”, which lays out a vision for reducing these kinds of pollution dramatically by 2050. Understanding how European citizens apprehend and act on different kinds of pollution, which is a contribution of the Action, is key for a successful implementation of the plan. Plans that take a fully top-down approach and that do not understand nor are attuned to the needs of the population are usually bound to fail. Also, through the making of the documentary film, which specifically deals with soil pollution and fertility, important questions are raised regarding the challenges, temporality and the very possibility of soil depollution. This film also shows examples of the multiplicity of practices that can be carried out to deal with the pollution of soil in former industrial sites, and head towards the recovery of its fertility.