Bodies in Protest. Steve Kroll-Smith

living room chairs and couches since 1989. They are foam filled and polyester covered. I sit only on cane Breuer chairs in my own home. Shower curtains, plastic implements, plastic bags, and plastic wrap for foods are out. I avoid plastic- and polyester-covered chairs whenever possible. This, of course, is almost impossible to do in our world.… I gradually eliminated the restaurants and auditoriums I would normally frequent, as the chemically treated air hurt a gland in my neck. I now never go to … theaters, movies, concerts, or plays, or into any commercially air-cooled or heated environment. I rarely go into stores of any kind as the chemicals in the treated air cause me pain which lasts for days after, and further open me to reactions from other sources.… This is not an environment I can tolerate.

      This account portrays a body unable to tolerate routine beauty techniques for making it attractive; a body that severely reacts to ordinary commercial furniture designed to offer it at least a modicum of rest; a body that responds violently to air passed through conventional heating and cooling systems designed to make it more comfortable; and a body that is intolerant of the seemingly countless products lining the shelves of stores and markets. It is as if this body is in protest against the products of modernity and, in its distress, is calling for a radical change in the conventional boundaries between safe and dangerous. If the built environment, in combination with any consumer item that is made with a chemical compound, renders the body chronically sick and unable to work or consume, nothing less than the transformation of material culture is warranted. Resistance to the cultural legitimation of this new and troublesome body is hardly surprising.

      Moreover, if the environmentally ill body portends a social transformation in production and consumption patterns, it also threatens the delicate filigree of personal habits and tastes, and their mutual confirmation in the highly stylized world of intimate and casual relationships. In the presence of one another, we depend on a shared, unspoken sense of what may be done or said without giving offense or committing an impropriety. For the chemically reactive, however, simple expressions of good taste and regard for others may become the sources of debilitating somatic distress. A man in his early thirties remembers

      asking the people in my office to stop putting on so much cologne and perfume; I asked my office partner to stop using starch in his shirts.… My mom was willing to use another bathroom air thing (freshener) but my dad thought all this was much too strange.… I know it sounds strange but these things make me sick.

      Somewhat indelicately, a more assertive woman reminds people around her, “Perfume causes brain damage. Think before you stink.”

      The judges who decide the winner of these skirmishes are arrayed throughout society, from intimate others, friends, work associates, and strangers who encounter the chemically reactive to municipal, county, state, and federal governments that are petitioned to accommodate them. These official and unofficial judges hear both accounts, the marginalized voices of the environmentally ill and their allies on one side and the powerful voices of medicine and trade groups on the other, supported by the suasive plea of an internalized culture that pronounces the domestic environments and products of modernity “safe” for human use. The important question is whether or not people and organizations are willing to change their behaviors regarding bodies and environments based on stories by nonprofessionals who borrow from the vernacular of biomedicine to fashion explanations of the origin of their troubles. If there is change, it is in opposition to the medical profession that refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of environmental illness as a bio-organic disorder. If there is evidence that people and especially organizations are listening to the stories of the chemically reactive and modifying social and physical environments to assist them in coping with their troubles, then an arguably new form of social learning is surfacing, one in which organizations are bypassing a profession as a source of knowledge and modifying their practices in accord with citizens’ professionally discredited accounts of bodies and environments.

      This complicated conflict over knowing, embedded in the controversies surrounding MCS, begins with the body. To paraphrase Lévi-Strauss, the chemically reactive body is good to think and talk; indeed, its peculiar somatic changes insist on thinking and talking. People with MCS are forced to think about why their bodies change in the presence of common consumer products and ordinary environments; and they are often forced to explain these peculiar somatic changes to skeptical others.

       Two Ways of Talking and Thinking, and the Reappearance of the Subject

      We can think about our bodies because we both are bodies and have bodies (Berger and Luckmann 1966). The question, “How do we have bodies?” is routinely answered in sociology with some variant of the word symbol. We “have” bodies because we talk about them. Indeed, bodies are fabricated in talk; they are, literally, figures of speech, tropes, embodied conversations, social constructions. Many conversations about the body are occurring simultaneously, however, some more privileged than others. The power of physicians and medical researchers is embedded in their use of biomedical talk to promote a culturally preferred account of the body and disqualify other accounts. To the profession of medicine society has given the right to author the body: to pronounce it legally alive, to name its systems and diseases, to control its capacity to labor by defining when it is sick and when it is well, and, finally, to pronounce it legally dead. From the birth certificate to the death certificate and everything in between, biomedicine is charged by the state with writing the somatic text.¹

      Consider, for example, a proud father who looks at his newborn daughter and observes, “She has my eyes and nose,” and thus locates her body in his lineage. Important as this moment is in the life of the father and daughter, of equal or greater importance is the issuance of a state birth certificate signed by a physician that officially recognizes the infant body as living and legally belonging to the father who gave her the eyes and nose and the mother who birthed her. In the absence of state certification of the live body of the infant, the date of birth, and her legal father and mother, recognizing a similarity between her nose and that of an adult would not be sufficient to establish paternity.