The Unequal Impact of Slow Violence and a Search for Alternative Means of Environmental Justice: Susanne Antonetta’s Body Toxic

Abstract

This study places toxic pollution incidents within the theoretical framework of “slow violence” and “necropolitics,” revealing that environmental injustice can be overlooked, or even concealed, leading to greater damage. Additionally, ways to counter slow violence are explored. Each point is illustrated in Susanne Antonetta’s environmental autobiography Body Toxic, which talks about the author and her neighbors’ experience with the effects of exposure to toxic chemicals, analyzed here as a form of slow violence. As a result, it becomes apparent why long-term exposure to toxic substances should be deemed slow violence, and the exact way in which this kind of violence exerts itself. Slow violence is structural and gradual, and has historically been the result of economics dictating government policies, often at the cost of health. Therefore, the process of causing slow physical and mental harm to those living in ethnic and deprived areas, as in the case of Antonetta and her neighbors, needs to be examined within the theoretical framework of necropolitics. Slow violence is an environmental injustice that is intensified and perpetuated by racial and social inequality, and this study considers how it can be countered and overcome.