Abstract
In this article, I examine what an analytic of touch offers for theorizing the impact of thirdhand smoke. Drawing on “scientific” claims about the danger of touching/being touched by objects permeated with thirdhand smoke and on online discussions about the exposure of infants to thirdhand smoke, I argue that touch permits insights unavailable to us in other analytically pursued sensory registers. It is smell that initially alerts people to the presence of thirdhand smoke and indicates that a bodily boundary has been crossed. But the fact that thirdhand smoke can shape shift to become sited on/in/as the sofa, the dry wall, or the familial skin—anything that thirdhand smoke has touched—means that relations of thirdhand smoke are haptic as well as odiferous. What could an analysis founded in touch tell us about the exclusionary familial and political relations that are forming up around thirdhand tobacco smoke?
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