Toxicity and Gender

By Michaela Hayes

Two months ago, I had the pleasure of interning for the two-day British Academy and Wellcome trust conference, ‘Resisting Toxic Climates: Gender, Colonialism, and Environment’, held at Edinburgh’s own Royal Botanic Gardens. The conference was organized by Dr. Rebecca Macklin, Dr. Alexandra Campbell, and Professor Michelle Keown, three scholars working predominantly in the field of literature. However, it featured speakers from a variety of academic backgrounds, including Indigenous Studies, Film Studies, Critical Race Studies, and the visual arts, to name just a few. Though by name these fields appear separate, the speakers were united by a shared desire to understand both the roots and impacts of toxic environments today.

“Environment” is left intentionally vague here; indeed, the strength of the conference lay in the refusal to concretely define the term. Rather, the speakers teased apart the many iterations of what “environment” might mean to individuals and communities, allowing the word to take whatever shape necessary to work towards deeper understanding of toxicity. As noted in Rebecca Macklin’s blog post promoting the event, the conference aimed to highlight “the toxic valences of coloniality, asking how toxicity manifests with particular regard to gender across variously situated bodies, lands and waterscapes”. Though we share the colonial condition of toxicity, it manifests in wildly different ways, and we must give voice to these critical divergences.

One of the conference organisers’ main goals was to dismantle the format of traditional academic conferences so that we might work towards a truer form of knowledge, one that values input from numerous perspectives, disciplines, and positionalities. The conference therefore took a horizontal approach, with all speakers given equal time and consideration regardless of the stage they’re at in their academic career.

The organisers were also careful to welcome undergraduate and master’s students alongside doctorates and professors. Temi Ajayi was one of a number of undergraduate students to attend the conference, saying that they went because a friend had recommended it to them. Temi is a student at the University of Edinburgh studying Human Geography who says they are primarily interested in “Black geographies, sense of place, as well as creative and participatory research methods—essentially looking at how race, art, and space interact with each other.” They found Professor Thandi Loewenson’s presentation on her project titled The Uhuru Catalogues to be particularly resonant with their interests, saying that it “managed to thread together race, space, colonialism and extraction in an engaging and artistic way.” Catalogues is a set of large- scale drawings etched into graphite blocks that examines the Uhuru x-ray anatomy satellite launched from a base off the coast of Kenya in 1970. In her project, Loewenson explores both the geopolitical context of the launching and the subsequent consequences of the geographical knowledge garnered from the satellite.

While Loewenson’s research was the most relevant to Temi, they listed Professor Meztli Yoalli Rodriguez’s presentation as the most impactful moment of the conference, saying that her presentation was “deeply personal and affective” because she “clearly approached her research with a lot of care and vulnerability which was refreshing to see in an academic context”. Rodriguez spoke about the climate grief that Oaxacan residents experience, specifically in reference to the ongoing ecocide in the Chacahua- Pastoría Lagoons. Rodriguez further tied this into other forms of grief, including her own over the loss of her mother, thereby blurring human/non-human lines and shedding light on the limits of preconceived notions of grief.

My personal favourite was Professor Savage Bear’s electrifying discussion of Indigenous erotics and First Nations communities in Canada. Her presentation centred on the desire to draw new landscapes of Indigenous existence through resistance to the colonial forces that see Indigenous bodies as sites of perverse sexuality and sin. She spoke of corporeal sovereignty and kinship strengthened by Indigenous stories that affirm belonging both to oneself and to each other, which directly opposes the separation and shame encouraged by coloniality. This is all grounded in paying attention to the erotic, both in its gendered and sexed variants and the erotics of everyday life.

A question that one might have is how the insights put forward by the presenters might be expanded to a global level. This is an understandable concern, especially given the large-scale natural disasters that are sweeping the globe. However, I believe that this conference made clear the critical necessity of community-centred research as well. Toxicity is always historically located, and each person, home, community, and so on, will be differently affected, meaning that the path to healing is never straightforward nor directly transferable. Community-specific resistance and activism is therefore just as vital as wide-scale problem-solving.

I want to believe that academia can be more than an ivory tower, and that cultural criticism can be productively located in community resistance. This conference gave me hope that this was possible, and that if we choose to listen to one another, great things are possible. Though the speakers were from varied locations and disciplines, the links between their shared resistance proved stronger than any differences, and in fact was strengthened by the multiple forms of knowledge production on display. This came to a head at the very end, in which all the attendees and speakers sat in a circle, sharing insights, takeaways, and planning for the future. As an early career academic, I was deeply impacted by those two days, and I hope that others were as well.

To read more about the speakers mentioned:

Thandi Loewenson:

http://www.grahamfoundation.org/grantees/6441-the-uhuru-catalogues

https://www.rca.ac.uk/more/staff/dr-thandi-loewenson/

Meztli Yoalli Rodríguez Aguilera (She/They):

https://www.yoallirodriguez.com

Savage Bear (She/Her):

https://miri.mcmaster.ca/researchers/dr-savage-bear/

A special thanks to Temi Ajayi for their wonderful contributions to this article. If you want to reach out to Temi (any and all pronouns), you can find them at T.Ajayi@sms.ed.ac.uk.

Author Bio

Michaela Hayes is a writer and researcher who just completed a MSc in Literature and Modernity at the University of Edinburgh. She wrote her dissertation on epistemology,posthumanism, and the rationality of feminist utopianism in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus. She plans on pursuing a PhD soon, but until then, she is freelance writing. You can reach her at michaelahayes225@gmail.com.