UC Berkeley

Glyphosate, the main ingredient in “Roundup” pesticide and a probable human carcinogen, is reportedly the most ubiquitous agricultural chemical on Earth. Finding the Man in the Glyphosate attempts to understand how this inescapable risk became a global reality, applying critical feminist theory and qualitative methodology. I focus on the academic discipline of toxicology science in particular, as practiced in the United States, critically analyzing textbooks, classroom pedagogy, and professional conferences. Because toxicology science is, by design, not only an applied but also a policy-producing science, I also assess the regulatory regimes of chemical risk assessment in the U.S., inclusive of national manuals and federal and state rule-making. Together, my critical discourse analysis of academic and regulatory toxicology texts, participant-observation of university-level toxicology courses and professional toxicology conferences, and semi-structured interviews with researchers, regulators, journalists, and advocates, demonstrates that toxicology is akin to a gas occupying the shape of its container. The current container happens to be hegemonic Euro-American scientific onto-epistemology, an Enlightenment-era rational empiricism based upon imperial pursuits of economic gain, nature as an object to be dominated, and the prerogatives of white male supremacy and heteropatriarchy. This sort of “logic,” I contend, helps explain how a carcinogenic and possibly endocrine-disrupting chemical like glyphosate remains legal, profitable, and proliferate—yet inequitably deployed. Moreover, I posit that the inherent biases of toxicology science and U.S. chemical risk assessment impede today’s environmental justice-seeking toxicologists from realizing their laudable goals of chemical bans and reparative clean-ups, for as long as science-the-authority is premised upon reactionary social and ecological hierarchies, any potential challengers are disadvantaged by the rules of a rigged game—“the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde 1984). I close with an invitation to environmental health advocates to embrace and enact a more explicitly politically engaged scientific practice, qualifying the power asymmetries that differently distribute toxic exposures alongside their edifying quantifications of the uneven burdens borne.