Chemical Disability and Technoscientific Experimental Subjecthood: Reimagining the Canary in the Coal Mine Metaphor

Abstract

The “canary in the coal mine” metaphor is used by the chemically sensitive community to make sense of and crip spaces containing low-levels of toxic atmospheric petrochemicals. This article reflects on the technocultural genealogies entrenched within the metaphor. A by-product of the imperial exotic bird trade, canary companion species played a formative role in early technoscientific understandings of toxic exposure starting in the nineteenth century as animal sentinels in coal mine rescues. Chemically sensitive people mobilize the canary metaphor to situate themselves within toxic environments as sentinel and experimental subjects, potentiating a feminist knowledge about chemical disability. Identifying as a human canary underscores how consumer commodities are universally structured for the chemical capacities of able-bodied male subjects, revealing gendered and ableist technocultural logics. The metaphor may also conjure a universal form of sacrificial life that ignores how canaries and self-identifying chemically sensitive people are differently situated in the colonial surround of racial capital. Canary knowledges arise from practicing metaphor as meaning and method—they offer a trajectory for crip-led community practices to build more capacious knowledges of exposure by extending anti-colonial and anti-racist commitments towards relational productions of accessibility. Reclaiming technoscientific experimental subjecthood can thus encourage new collective possibilities to address the global onslaught of chemical violence.