Environmental Health as Biosecurity: “Seafood Choices,” Risk, and the Pregnant Woman as Threshold

Environmental pollutants are now widespread not only in the environment but in human bodies. Seafood is one of the main sources of human exposure to many of these chemicals, with concern mainly about effects on fetal development. This article examines toxicological, epidemiological, and other public health scholarship on contaminated seafood to understand how these environmental health concerns are constituted as an object of knowledge and management. Analyzing current approaches to contaminated seafood through the lens of biopolitics, the article shows that the dominant approach is one in which risk is used to secure the population by calculating the net benefits and hazards of women's seafood consumption, with the goal being to influence women's “seafood choices.” This marks a new arena of biopolitical concern about how the contaminated environment is changing the nature of humans by altering cognitive development and intelligence. It also marks a new, highly gendered regime of biosecurity in which women are positioned as protectors of the population against the threat of contamination. By calculating proper seafood choices, risk spatializes reproductive women as the bodily threshold between the contaminated environment and the population. Risk thus places responsibility for environmental health on women, who must make proper choices to manage movement of pollutants through their own bodies. In making this argument, the article opens up a new field of inquiry into health as a nature–society issue and contributes new insight about the constitutive role of both gender and environment in biopolitics.