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Drawing attention to the toxicity engendered by conventional American corpse disposal methods, my research has begun to explore cemeteries as visual archives that demonstrate how hegemonic conceptualizations of the human are constituted through toxicity.

I took this image during a visit to the Pacora mangrove forest off the Pacific coast of Panamá during a natural producst research collection trip. I was following biotech scientists who looking for fungi in leaves on this edge of the isthmus since it harbors a unique environment - wooded wetlands thriving under pulsating tides. As we walked towards an old-growth mangrove forest I was taken aback by the levels of plastic an other refuse in what was supposed to be a protected conservation area.

It has been argued that: “space is not naturally authentically “straight” but rather actively produced and (hetero)sexualized” (Binnie 1977a: 223). Planning scholar Michael Frisch (2002) goes further to suggest that planning emerged as a heterosexist project. Examining three dualisms within planning discourse: order/disorder, family/household, and public/private, Frisch argues that planning fundamentally promotes heterosexism through laws, ordinances, and regulations that continue to marginalize gays and lesbians (2002: 254).

This essay seeks to expand theorization on toxicity by tracing the ways in which "toxic injury" and "toxic stress" have emerged as categories for clinical and juridicial claims making. I am particularly interested in the ways in which toxic injury as is both enrolled and undermined as a useful explanatory model for conditions which resist diagnosis. Given the ways in which toxic subjects are rendered invisible by dominant understandings of transmission, injury, and time, new forms of visualization and reading are called for.