Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers

In "Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics", Michelle Murphy “highlights the versatile and volatile work of gender in twentieth-century practices of rendering environmental health hazards perceptible and knowable. In the 1980s, gender and chemical exposures both generated controversy and uncertainty” (pg. 6). She argues that indoor chemical exposures “came into being through multiple histories that did not all agree on the terms by which an exposure could be shown to have happened or not” (pg. 8). Finally, Murphy “suggests regimes of perceptibility actively participated in making chemical exposures the phenomena they are today. In order to throw imperceptibility into relief through juxtaposition, this book makes a second argument about the historical ontology of exposure: objects are many things at once” (pg. 10). In this manner, Murphy’s work uses Sick Building Syndrome to examine the intersections of race, gender, class, and science.Of class, Murphy writes, “Sick building syndrome was a problem only possibly in conditions of relative privilege and luxury that characterized Reagan-era America. It captured those minor health complaints only foregrounded when larger dangers receded. It expressed an expectation of comfort and safety as conditions of daily life for the beneficiaries of the privileges of race and class” (pg. 3). Race played a critical role in defining class, as Murphy writes, “Historians of science have tended to take up questions of race only when examining acts of racism or when ‘race’ has been the subject of science. Much less attention has been paid to the inverse subject of racialized disadvantage – the work of racialized privilege” (pg. 112). Class and gender intersected, as “the middle-class gendering of office work that was built into its very walls was fundamental to the covering over of class stratifications that were built into its very machines” (pg. 56).Murphy writes of gender, “During the 1970s, a resurgent feminism and a newly articulated environmentalism spawned an office-workers movement that made occupational health, and particularly chemical exposures, one of its concerns” (pg. 3). Office buildings were uniquely situated to play host to clashes between older gender ideologies and the consciousness-raising of feminists. Murphy writes, “Office buildings were not just luxurious spaces for the American managerial class: they were also constructed to promote the efficient labor of the droves of mostly women in the office’s lower ranks. Perceptions about the physiological needs of these laborers were built into the very pipes and ducts of office buildings” (pg. 19). The bounds of comfort were primarily dictated by men, as “optimum climate was charted through measurements largely taken from the bodies of young, white college men” (pg. 25). When officials examined Sick Building Syndrome complaints, they reflected the gendered assumptions of their time and of corporate culture. Murphy writes, “Investigators at NIOSH [the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health] found themselves turning to psychosomatic explanations, such as mass hysteria and mass psychogenic illness (MPI), to make sense of the variety and nonspecificity of women office workers’ complaints. Perhaps, some investigators suggested, such symptoms were a gendered psychological response to life stresses” (pg. 71). NIOSH opinions were divided into two camps. Murphy writes, “One arguing that indoor pollution existed in chronic and non-specific forms and that sick building syndrome was a legitimate phenomenon, the other holding that sick building syndrome was a misnomer for what was better understood as a gendered psychological delusion” (pg. 83).Ironically, the tobacco industry brought Sick Building Syndrome to the forefront as its nonspecific cause aided their effort to combat efforts to regulate secondhand smoke and “promote an ecological and systems approach to indoor pollution” (pg. 132). For them, “The appeal of sick building syndrome was that pollution and its effects could be materialized in a way impossible to regulate – as an unpredictable multiplicity” (pg. 148). In this manner, Murphy argues, “The terms by which sick building syndrome was granted existence…were the result of a contested ontological politics” (pg. 149).