By Isabella Clark, PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology

My dissertation examines multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), a condition where people experience physical symptoms in response to “normal” doses of everyday chemicals. These symptoms vary and include brain fog, rashes, headaches, respiratory problems, nausea, and fatigue, amongst other things. MCS is a contested illness; its material reality is often dismissed in favor of a psychological explanation by both doctors and lay people. Like other contested illnesses such as chronic Lyme disease and chronic fatigue syndrome, a disproportionate number of sufferers are thought to be women (Dumes 2020). This perception is supported in my own data, as almost double the number of respondents were women (I interviewed 19 women and 11 men). 

To manage MCS, people practice chemical avoidance, a task that proves onerous, complicated, and even impossible given the levels of chemical saturation in private and public life. To escape hostile synthetic chemicals, as well as mold and other naturally occurring allergens, some people with MCS move to the Southwest for the desert ecosystem. MCS can make housing intolerable, forcing some people to live out of their vehicles. Since parts of the Southwest are warm year-round, this contributes to its position as a potential haven for sufferers, though total freedom from chemicals is never possible. As such, small communities of people with MCS are scattered across the Southwest. Thanks to the CSWS grant, I traveled to the Southwest in the summer of 2022 where I lived out of a camper van for almost a month, conducting interviews and observing the living conditions of people in a rural MCS area. I conducted 10 interviews during this fieldwork trip, eight interviews over a later trip, and 12 interviews over the phone or via Zoom. 

My initial analysis produced three central themes: embodied socialization, social interactions, and avoidance. Regarding our cultural relationship to chemical and scented products, I argue our use of fragrances and chemicals in everyday life is a form of embodied socialization. While socialization is often conceived of as a mental process teaching us how to behave, there is a physicality to this form of socialization that inculcates us to experience scents in a particular way (as clean, pleasant, and attractive, for example) and deny the disparate embodied experiences people have with smells. Gender clearly relates to this embodied socialization as women are more heavily socialized into product use by the greater responsibilities they’re tasked with toward beauty, family health, domestic labor, and consumer purchases. I hope to expand on this dimension of my work through future interviews with friends and family members of those with MCS. This will allow me to explore how different forms of embodiment conflict with one another and how people negotiate this.

Relatedly, chemicals are critically present within social interactions, meaning people’s choices around chemical products can impact people with MCS. This differs from existing work in environmental sociology on how and why people manage everyday chemical exposures. MacKendrick finds mothers engaging in “precautionary consumption” to protect their children, and to some extent themselves, from potentially toxic chemicals (2018). While this labor is gendered, the relationship exists between consumer product and consumer body but does not stretch any further. However, my respondents make it clear they are impacted by others’ choices like the laundry products on their friend’s clothes or their neighbor’s use of pesticides to garden. These encounters can feel violent, with respondents calling them “assaults” or “hits.” Alaimo writes of MCS, “environmental illness offers a particularly potent example of trans-corporeal space, in which the human body can never be disentangled from the material world, a world of biological creatures, ecosystems, and xenobiotic, humanly made substances” (2010, 115). I look at how these entanglements show up in interpersonal relationships and how people navigate them. 

Avoidance is the main recourse people with MCS have. However, trying to avoid chemicals when you have severe MCS encompasses your entire life. As Myles told me, “Coping with MCS is a full-time job.” This labor is not only mentally draining but also emotionally draining. Danielle described to me her sadness over how much energy she now must put into finding a shirt she can wear. She contrasts this task with the intellectually rewarding work she did before she was sick. The amount of thought, energy, and labor people with MCS must expend on banal parts of everyday life indicates the toll chemical entrenchment is taking on their lives. As my analysis proceeds, I am paying close attention to how chemical avoidance strategies may be gendered.  

—Isabella Clark, Sociology, received a 2022 CSWS Graduate Student Research Grant for this project.

References

Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Dumes, Abigail A. 2020. “Putting Ethnographic Flesh on New Materialist Bones: Lyme Disease and the Sex/Gender Binary.” Feminist Anthropology 1(2): 248–59.

MacKendrick, Norah A. 2018. Better Safe than Sorry: How Consumers Navigate Exposure to Everyday Toxics. Oakland, California: University of California Press.