Told by Dioxin: Laura Conti and Seveso’s Bodies

Abstract

What is a narrative agent and what are the political effects of a material narrative? This essay addresses such issues by considering the case of Italy’s first big ecological disaster, occurred in Seveso in 1976. A cloud of dioxin burst out from an industrial site, poisoning people and territory, killing livestock and domestic animals, causing miscarriages and fetal malformations, and producing strong political and ideological polemics over women, their bodies, and their right to self-determination. Laura Conti, scientist, writer, and environmental activist, witnessed and narrated the catastrophe in both its ecological and political dimensions. Analyzing her works, and focusing on dioxin as a "posthuman narrative agent," namely, as a revealing agent that interlaces both materiality and its discursive reverberations, I reflect on how feminist ecocriticism may act as an epistemological tool for an ethics and politics of liberation. This study situates itself in the broader horizon of a feminist theory of material ecocriticism, one that investigates the representations of the body, of inter- and trans-corporeality, multiple causality, complexity and agentic entanglements of matter and discourse.