Multiscalar Toxicities: Mapping Environmental Injustice in and Beyond the Nail Salon

The dissertation attends to the entanglement of toxicities at multiple temporal and spatial scales from bodies to workplaces to homes to communities as well as across generations. This work centers the nail salon a site of potential environmental and occupational health harms due to routine exposure to toxicants, labour exploitation, and verbal and other abuses. These hazards are rooted in structural inequities that position immigrant-settler women of colour in precarious and dangerous work environments as well as have broader roots in global structures of extraction. The dissertation employs multiple methods grounded in feminist methodologies, centering the experiential and embodied knowledges of 37 Toronto-based nail technicians through occupational health mapping – a worker-centered visual method that maps workplace hazards and potential solutions. While there is growing scholarship on occupational harm in the nail salon context, this work differs in that it positions the nail salon in relation to broader structural violences. This is in contrast to framings of harm that are body-bound, body-centric, or a result of our individual "choices."

This analysis reveals that dangerous workplace conditions – rooted in the racialized and gendered manifestations of capitalist exploitation – are embedded in/on workers' bodies and impact their abilities to enact relations of care with kin. The toxicants that harm nail technicians health find their material and symbolic roots in the colonial, gendered, and environmental violence of petroleum extraction and petrochemical production. These processes manifest corporeal-level and community-wide intergenerational harm. To approach and link these multiple scales of violence, this work puts forth an expanded conception of environmental justice (EJ) – one that conceptually and methodologically rejects the politics of borders, such as between bodies, work, and home; between those deemed "unwelcome" and those welcomed, and; between nodes in the commodity chain. Following Pellow's (2018) Critical Environmental Justice approach, to limit manifestations of environmental racism, sexism, and violence to certain "sacrifice zones" conceals the extent and reach of the violence; it perpetuates erasure. Embodied and local manifestations of harm in the nail salon are one node in a broad and interrelated web of gendered violences fueled by extractive logics. While centering workers' voices and the nail salon environment, this dissertation traces the interrelations of different spatial and temporal scales of violence, demonstrating that environmental harms are expansive, interconnected, and warrant broadened solidarities. As violence is multiscalar, so is resistance. While liberal environmental health campaigns tout body-centric "solutions," nail technicians' resistance to racial and gendered manifestations of capitalist exploitation occur at multiple scales – the molecular, the interpersonal, and the collective. To look beyond the nail salon demands broadened relations of solidarity – ones that transcend both space and time.