Rethinking Temporalities of Endocrine Disruptor Panics: Anxious Time and Evolutionary Time as Multispecies Intimacy

Abstract

Queer studies, feminist environmentalisms and critical animal studies have come together in recent panic about the effects of endocrine disruptors on wildlife, but they have not adequately attended to the ways that temporality operates. This thesis argues that temporality is fundamental in the construction of difference surrounding sex, gender, race, nation, and species, particularly in these sex panics. In so doing, it performs close readings of early environmental feminist literature and recent news articles, TED Talks, and documentaries on the “feminization” of frogs in the U.S. and also in the Aamjinwaang First Nation. This thesis expands Alaimo’s theory of evolutionary time (2012) and offers the framework of anxious time, a forward- and backward-looking temporality of anxiety and nostalgia that fixates on reproductive longevity of the species rather than present wellbeing. It argues that temporality can also be used subversively through a politics of imagination that recognizes our shared precarity with humans and non-humans alike.