This talk examines global "multivalences" and ramifications of mercury in the air, water and soil. Goldstein engages notions of the Pachamama and gendered "nature" with the Greek term "oikos" – the root of the English "eco." In doing so, she brings critical race theory and indigenous studies to bear on (eco)feminist scholarship. Oikos," which translates into: "dwelling," "household," "home," or "family," lends itself to think through the "eco" in "ecologies" and "economies" to consider the roles that gender, sexuality, race, class, and abled-bodies play in changing forms of kinship, citizenship, and (environmental) politics beyond and within the concept of "the human." Concentrating on mercury in its conceptual and actual form, she traces levels of contamination in the human bodies that labor in rainforest gold mines, the impact on maternal-fetal health, and mercury's role in theories of (social) contamination that (re)produce different kinds of environments and environmental racisms. She asks how the concept of "home" in the "eco" structures ideas about who and what bodies carry a toxic "body burden" and what the collapse of women's bodies with the built landscape means for designating responsibility in planetary health.

 

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