EDC's as Industrial Chemicals and Settler Colonial Structures: Towards a Decolonial Feminist Approach

Oil refineries and settler colonialism are not typically how feminist and environmental frameworks scope the problem of endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs). Instead, it is much more common to find EDCs described as a problem of packaging, plastics, and consumer goods, and to characterize their effects as a problem of bodily damage, and particularly as injuries or alterations to the reproductive and sexual development of individuals. This paper seeks to disrupt these individualized, molecularized, damage-centered and body-centered frames, and to strengthen decolonial feminist frameworks for understanding EDCs. We contend that our understanding of EDCs must expand to the structures of settler colonialism and racial capitalism that accompany oil extraction and refining, as well as to the distribution of emissions to airs, waters and lands. Building on the argument that pollution is colonialism, we hold that EDCs are materially a form of colonial environmental violence, disrupting land/body relations, and at the same time, are made possible by a permission-to-pollute regulatory regime.