Dionysus Undone: A Brief Institutional Ethnography on Pesticide Use

By Richard Birch
SCEN1401 Environmental Science
Professor Gamroth
This work Copyright (C) 2005 Richard Birch

Preface:
This short paper was an assignment for my Environmental Science elective class. We were required to compose a brief statement disclosing our stance on pesticide use. Knowing full well that this is a science course, I asked the professor if I could tap into sociological ideas on this topic. She seemed very interested, addressing the fact that sociology is a science as well. In my research I discovered a specific form of social inquiry called Environmental Sociology, which is the study of the effects human interaction has on the natural environmental world. I was intrigued by it and chose to take a risk and do this paper, rather than merely spouting out scientific data on the topic. The empirical data, for all sides of the argument seem almost to be relentlessly stuck on the "what is" of pesticide use, rather than the "how has pesticide use come to be existent?" discourse. In other methods of inquiry, Environmental Sociology could be a premise for further grounds and modes in the growing theories developed in Quantum Sociology. In my current research on sexuality and gender social theory, any ideas relating to quantum particulars and the social are a welcome transgression. Already some ideas have come to mind about sexual social theory from reading on environmental pesticide use, as weird and unrelated as this may sound. First, the natural environmental is full of asymetiricalities. It is completely imperfect, and wonderfully so. It is refreshing to think about how the structure of social knowledge that lends itself heavily to ideas around the manipulation of the environment relates so strongly to discursive thought on the nature of expressive individuality, sexual and asexual consciousness, and the naturality/unaturailty of engendered homoeostasis. Secondly, pesticide use, as unbeknown to me is yet to be socially theorized in the rhetorical sense. Yet it can easily be compared to the nature of oppression and subordination to any natural/unnatural physical social existence. When people are measuring their experiences in the natural environment, especially in accordance to their physical knowing of their place in it, it is very much a phenomenology. To posit an account of one's knowing of their physical world is a phenomenological recognition of their connectivity to the natural world. Thus, something as intrusive and dialectically opposing to the health of living things as pesticide technology is what binds one to their environmental phenomena. That is the nature of my paper. That was the standpoint from which a social inquiry had to be trajectorized in the midst of the rational, normative, textbook ideas of pesticide use.

Dionysus Undone: A Brief Institutional Ethnography on Pesticide Use.

I am drawn to cultural concerns that discuss the effects human behaviour has on the natural environment. When we examine the physical effects of utilizing chemical pesticide technology, we are also looking at interactions between society and the physical surroundings that encompass aggregate ecosystems. People are also part of these ecosystems in both habitat and labour contexts. Knowing the effects human interaction has on the natural environment is not complete if it does not entail an understanding of the social processes that have directed the nature of pest control industries and cultural attitudes for generations. It is a very different knowing of the environment. It is a knowing built around an environmental sociological questioning of how social institutions such as corporations and the government have shaped how we perceive the natural world we dwell in. By using a method of institutional ethnography, particularly that of corporate institutions, one can arguably uncover and possibly even undo socio-environmental oppression in a postmodern world. For human pesticide poisoning is not merely an issue of physical and environmental health, it is also directly related to global processes of cultural oppression.

Pest control technology and its use have been existent since the beginning of agriculture itself. However it wasn’t until after the introduction of DDT in a post World War-Two era of early globalization and postmodern capitalist development, when serious health risks to humans were first recorded and documented (Knight, 2003). It was during this period when society first started to become more aware of the global human health risks exposure to pesticide products bring. In more recent years, awareness of the risks of pesticide poisoning have been significant in developing countries, especially when looking at the health of small farm and agricultural workers whose pesticide use has been largely unregulated by government and corporate institutions (Jansen, 2000). International debate on the merits and potential for globally harmonized regulation of pesticides is still sluggishly divided on issues of product control, research of alternatives, funding, and consumer education. Yet decades after human capital and environmental exploitation was first addressed, growing commercial demand for superior agricultural food products in the developed world has resulted in more advanced and hazardous insecticide chemicals being shipped to the developing corners of the globe, where the need to control insect population increases annually (2000).

Yet we do exist in a world where alternatives have been developed for commercial use. One of the most preferred and highly promoted forms of alternative pest control comes under an umbrella category known as Integrated Pest Management or IPM. This is a classification of control technology, where typically combinations of organic and chemical methods are used to reduce the utilization and permeation of harmful pathogens in the environment. The goal is to limit damage to environmental, economic, and social structures at the macroglobal level (Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development, 2000).

However, before any significant interest can experience sizable momentum in this direction, what first needs to be affected are global processes and cultural attitudes towards pesticide use. Furthermore any alterations to pest control technologies, sciences, research, and product marketing will only take place if master narratives of capitalist productive order alter global ruling relations of power. As published by both the Canadian Labour Congress and the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the primary social group in both Canadian and International units of analysis, which are the most likely to experience chronic health problems from long-term pesticide use are agricultural workers (2000). Yet this environmental sociological knowing is still negated by the fact that what is more important than the health of farm workers in both domestic and developing cultures, is the perfect shade of red on an apple from Blue Mountain, or the absence of predator insect populations in coffee bean fields in Colombia, South America. I myself am of the consumer regime who demands the same quality and the same essence of natural production; and thus I am also of the same problem of pesticide use and of the institution of corporate ideology which assigns some to fields where they are poisoned. Pesticide use and the erasure of natural environmental species and ecosystems is the postmodern equivalent to the colonial erasure of the histories of earlier societies through European settlement of North America during the 1500’s, 1600’s and so on. It has been produced through the fracturing of human existence from the natural environment in a consumerist techno-capitalist society. As the Canadian institutional ethnographer Dorothy Smith wrote, “the very organization of the world that has been assigned to us as the primary locus of our being…is determined by and subordinate to the relations of society founded in a capitalist mode of production” (Smith, 1990). Before any real change can occur in the use of pesticides, changes to cultural attitudes regarding the use at the human level must first be constructed.

References:
Jansen, K. (2000) Making Policy Agendas For Safe Pesticide Use: Public and Private Interests in Technology Regulation in a Developing Country. London, UK: The European Inter-University Association on Society, Science and Technology. Retrieved May 17, 2005 from www.esst.uio.no/posti/workshops/jansen.pdf

Knight, C. (2003) Right To Know: Maine Agricultural Workers and Pesticide Safety. Lewiston, ME: Service Learning Project. Retrieved May 17, 2005 from http:// academic.bowdoin.edu/environmental_studies/ service_learning/dissemination/carly.pdf

Smith, D. (1990). The Conceptual Practices of Power. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.

Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development. (2000) Pesticides: Making the Right Choice for the Protection of Health and the Environment. Retrieved May 18, 2005 from http://www.parl.gc.ca/InfoComDoc/36/2/ENVI/Studies/Reports/envi01/18-ch11-e.html

Rainbow Flag

Deconstructing Sexuality

By Richard Birch
STAS 2127 Research Methods & Data Analysis
This work Copyright (C) 2005 Richard Birch

This essay won First Place in the Laurentian University at Georgian 2005 Essay Contest in the Second Year Student Category.

Note for reading: This essay is dual-textual. The reader will see two seperate texts evolving side-by-side simultaneously. The main text which is posted here in normal black and normal font size is a sociological deconstruction of the research data utilized for this project. The secondary text which was originaly an ongoing footnote evolving along the bottom of each page in the essay is posted here in smaller green font. This secondary text, which can be read seperately has been posted here, starting and ending at exactly the same points along the main text as it was in the original paper. Thus, the green sections was printed at the bottom of each page and the main text above each green section was the pre-occuring main text on the same page when this essay was first submitted for academic review. The main text (normal font / black) is deconstructing my research data. The green text ongoing notation, is textually deconstructing my initial deconstruction. The reader is free to interpret which of the two textual entities constitute the real essay. This style of deconstruction is based on the Derridian format developed by French post-structuralist thinker Jacques Derrida. I have adapted, or in some way, cluster-fucked this format with Ann Game's method of undoing the social.

Deconstructing Sexuality

The method chosen for this qualitative research project is Deconstruction. Deconstruction is a method that allows the social science researcher to be guided by the desire for knowing the grandeur in the micro-social. When researching the experiences of Laurentian at Georgian students who are categorized in the LGTBQ construct, otherwise known as Lesbian, Gay, Transgendered, Bisexual, Queer or questioning, the desire of the researcher is the basis for uncovering knowledge. For the researcher engaged in asking questions of sexuality, gender, and gender choices, which are all issues for people in the LGTBQ construct, he or she can use deconstructive sociological methodology to discover social realities in the social fictitious construction of sexuality. Sexuality, as a fact, is really a fiction, a construct, an aggregate understanding of gender and gender choice from a collective social mind. Ann Game, in her work on undoing the social, guides the researcher in this method by a process of unsettling the relationship between social reality and representation through texts. Texts comprise information just as the interviews done for this study on the experiences of LGTBQ students disclose textual information on the topic. Game points out in her book, “…texts and language are somehow less real than social reality which remains as extra-discursive context” (Game, 1991, p. 4). Looking upon the written textual experiences of LGTBQ respondents in this explanation, one is thus

Quite clearly institutional ethnography would also have been just as valid a choice for method in studying the experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Transgendered, Bisexual, Queer or otherwise Questioning (LGTBQ) Laurentian at Georgian students. Typically one could engage in seeking an understanding on the experiences of LGTBQ students in relation to how they interact with each other on campus, with other students who do not identify as LGTBQ, and how their sexuality affects their choices in programs, courses, and topics of interest for research, whether from purely an academic or from a social activist standpoint. The method of institutional ethnography would be extremely useful in extrapolating issues and analyzing how the personal subjective accounts of gay students in the university environment are ether dismissed, misread, misrepresented, or subjected to the erasure by master narratives and textual realities of ruling. However, during the development of the interview questions it became very clear to me that is was not so much my interest in the accounts of LGTBQ students that was important as a

enlightened to the notion that the text is thus textual production, otherwise called “sociological fictions” (Game, 1991, p. 5).

Deconstructing the Data
Thematically there are two things that can be uncovered in the analysis of the sample’s interviews. Themes in this deconstruction are challenged in the form of questions such as how can something have become or why has something been constructed as reality? The first such question or theme that connects the interviews and data recorded is related to the phenomenon of labels. When listening to the respondents speaking about sexuality as an actual reality, as a structure, and as something that can be defined as such, it becomes very problematic. Why does being queer matter? Why should there be labels that define and differentiate people into categories according to sexual practices and patterns of personal connectivity? One respondent in explaining why she at times wishes to view herself as asexual rather than homosexual stated:

"I don’t want to be defined I guess. Maybe asexuality isn’t the right word for it. It shouldn’t be an issue. You know the Kinsey scale, the sliding scale where if you’re 0 you’re straight and if you’re 6 you’re gay? Why do we even need that? I don’t think there should be a need for any of it. People are happier"(Respondent Interview 1).

researcher. What was important, and became obvious to me, was my intense desire to investigate this topic. I truly desired to know. To uncover, to unravel, and to find extremities in something that seems very murky in sexuality as a social construction was what I wanted to discover. I knew that focusing on the institutional experiences of this social group would only produce information, as it would relate to textual guidelines of oppression and social subordination. But that seemed too obvious. That wasn’t what I wanted to do. It wouldn’t have seemed important from the standpoint of this researcher. What was required in method was something radical, something that could strip away all preconceived notions of what I wanted to, or thought I would and could discover. As an out gay man, I already know my experiences are dismissed and my personal subjectivity is that of a minority. Something new may be found, yes, but would it have purpose and be of any quality? Deconstruction as method became attractive because if I were to understand and undo any understanding of what is socially constructed as that of the LGTBQ

This concern resonates in every interview. In questioning the nature of how society defines human sexuality, it seems that it is not merely the act of labelling that is of real importance. It is the obsession people have with the rules of labelling that is fundamentally intrinsic to this analysis. The discursive idea behind labels with all three respondents is built around the idea of obsession. More importantly, it is the obsession and desire for adhering to rules of labelling and defining sexual identity. The experiences of the respondents seem to indicate that society problematizes their sexuality because sexuality and gender’s fluid nature is problematic for the master processes of oppression. Agency of the respondents presented here is the form defined by Game. When looking at agency of the respondents as “the status of the subject of sociological knowledge,” what connects their concern with the obsession of sexual labels and roles in society with their criticism of the act of labelling one as gay, straight, bisexual or queer, are the social processes that maintain their master status as oppressed individuals (Game, 1991, p. 6).

Fear of judgement and negative sanctions based on sexuality relative to oppressive processes is another theme directly connected to the first. Challenging the respondents to evaluate their relationships with faculty and students in the Laurentian at Georgian program, presented further evidence of how these LGTBQ students are very judgment-sensitive in this educational environment. One of the respondents was asked to state who in the Laurentian at

Laurentian at Georgian student experience, I would have to deconstruct myself intersubjectively. I would as a researcher place myself in the subjective as far as I can possibly go so not to just learn and know the institutional relationships I would experience as a gay student, but more importantly, I would focus on my desire to know as a gay student. Maybe I am led to this desire of knowing for I am like my lesbian respondent who wishes to be asexual. I most of the time do not feel that I am gay, because deep down I do not feel sexuality at all. I am just a sexual being as any other organically composed human being. Yet, like everyone, I fall into the trap of relating my sexuality as that of rules of constructivism. But in line with deconstructive analysis, the above quote on page 3 questions my own preconceived assumptions about homosexuality. Is stating that sexuality is merely a construction really a cop-out? For almost the first thirty-years of my existence I failed to find the courage to expel my own fears about being gay and to live as a self-actualized gay man. Yet, is holding to the idea that all sexuality and gender as

Georgian environment would be problematic if they found out her bisexuality. She responded that it would be students who were directly related or connected to some of the [people] she teaches [omission of information by request of respondent] to outside of the college.

"There is a time when they take off their [items omitted by request of the respondent], but you still have to support their back and keep holding onto them. It’s not sexual at all, and it’s not that the majority of people would feel that way, but sometimes I am terrified they would become a problem, for just at least one person. If just one person had a complete freak out that would be so horrible. I don’t ever want to go through that" (Respondent Interview 2).

This constitutes the relationship this respondent has with Laurentian students as relative to power and knowledge. As Game points out according to Hegelian assumptions on knowledge and power, all relations are mediated by power. One of these Hegelian assumptions states “inter-subjective knowledge is a relation of power; desire is structured around power” (Game, 1991, p. 8). To deconstruct this fear of judgement even further using this assumption, the respondent’s knowledge of her bisexuality has been defined as such and is made problematic by the master discourse of sexual oppression of LGTBQ people in society. For the third respondent whose interview accounted for his experiences as a bisexual male in the Laurentian at Georgian

constructions and cultivated constituted acts of performance equally cowardly? I am assuming that I am no different from anyone else and that my existential accounts should be as textual as that of a heterosexual student. Yet, my accounts are not the same. Maybe it is time Queerists should question their sociology derived from that of queer studies and theory. I am not suggesting in this analysis that the queer social scientist should negate that essence of critical discourse in heteronormativity and it’s master textual realities. The queer social scientist can only ever produce textual realities from his or her own subjective knowing. Yet, maybe I do not buy into the idea of sexuality as fluid. Maybe it is very fragmented and should not have to be “taken well” in the fluid definition. Fluidity implies a diluting of sexual diversity. If I have chosen to live in my own diverse sexual nature, then why am I as a gay Laurentian student trying to still fit into heteronormative social constructive gender roles in this environment? Diversity should be revered and made a centre of study, sometimes questioning whether diversity as completely

university program, his concern in this area went even further. His criticism for the lack of ‎adequate support resources available for LGTBQ students was indicative of the college’s lack of promoting sexual and gender diversity as a whole in the student population.

"I would want my students to be more aware of how to deal with homosexuality. How students have to deal with it on and off campus, and with parents and family. It’s hard. I don’t know. I’m very, I don’t want to say saddened, but I am very aware right now of the lack of resources that Georgian College has" (Respondent Interview 3).

What this indicates is the respondent’s uneasiness with being bisexual at Laurentian at Georgian. Throughout the interview with this respondent, there was a tone of sadness and disappointment. It certainly was the harshest in its criticism, and in being so was the most informative on the nature of the social experiences of LGTBQ students in this environment. It relates again to the question of agency and power. The underlying theme underneath this respondent’s account is that it is unsafe to be an LGTBQ student at Laurentian at Georgian. The need for a separate and dedicated office environment for LGTBQ students such as the facilities at other universities is important for this student, for it represents a symbol of power in this oppressive master narrative. He feels that in order for judgement from those who comply with oppressive principles to be thwarted, and for his coming out to be taken well, he would best be served by the protection of

inclusive should be made clear and vocal. Deconstruction is the process of questioning the very assumptions and beliefs the researcher has about his or her own subjectivity. I question constantly how I am judged in this educational environment. I question it as much as I do outside this environment, just as the respondent describes on page 5 of this paper. I also don’t want to go through the judgment and to have it deal with the ramifications of such oppressive action. However because I am not of heteronormativity I am oppressed, enslaved even, in patriarchal heteronormal capitalist productive society. My identification as a gay male posits myself into the objective antithesis of production. Labels as stated by the third respondent in his interview such as “fag” and “gay” and “queer” and “homo” when translated as texts are made useful by the semiotic meanings behind them, which relate to the queer identity as that which does not contribute to the biological production of and the procreation of a surplus labour force in a capitalist society. Deconstructive definition of such labels listed above codify the homosexual as the deviant sexual being as originally codified as mentally ill during the mid 1800’s for purposes of protecting

official status recognition as LGTBQ. His acceptance and to be taken well represents equality to those complying with productive ideologies. He feels he does not possess power in his life for he recognizes that he is powerless in this master process. That is also analytically explicative of his seeming hesitation to identify as gay.‏

"I’ve always questioned it and it sucks. I want to be at the point where I don’t have to question it anymore. I am comfortable with who I’ve dated in the past and I am comfortable with who I am currently dating. However, I think, as I get older I may lean towards being more gay, if that is politically correct or accurate. It’s weird because, well it’s not weird, but I am still attracted to women in some sense" (Respondent Interview 3).

This respondent exemplifies his sexuality as devalued currency in the capitalist productive order. Sexuality can be related to being a currency as such in the sense that those who do not comply with heteronormative ideologies can enjoy freedom from being made an object of subordination. This freedom from subordination and oppression is fundamental to the three respondents in the sample. They seem to always be in conflict with the act of relating their true sexuality and attempting to appropriate their values into the mainstream currents of their social spheres. There never does seem to be a happy middle ground. Even the first respondent, who claims to be in some way at peace with her objectified status in the university and is comfortable with the level

‏youth and society from it’s non-capitalistic nature. To be queer is to not be productive. Queer identification thus queers the further production of capital. My fear of judgment has its roots in this intrinsic and rather strategic master process, which is why for me I too hesitated to identify truly as gay. To be queer is both threatening and threatened in society. Because I do not comply with heteronormal ideologies of sexual procreation any further, and thus do not wish to engage in my “responsibility” as a citizen of a productive society I am subjected to harm and the potential of violence. How nice it would be to have an LGTBQ office at Laurentian at Georgian for those of us who understand this threat of what Game defines as “ the power of systematicity…the power to ‘reduce all others to the economy of the Same’” (Game, 1991, p. 14). Homosexuality is a currency of exchange not unlike heterosexuality. For the purposes of pleasure and knowledge, sexuality buys pleasure and connectivity for those who reify social constructs

of out-ness she enjoys, still remarks heavily on how her sexuality is still a classification that should not be important.‪

"Yet I am not a big proponent of dividing people into groups and classes. I think we need to be less concerned about sexuality in general. I’d rather it not be the issue that it is today" (Respondent Interview 1).

Labels and judgements are two themes that connect the respondents to each other in this research. Equally important still, these do connect to each other very strongly. When deconstructing the essences of these two themes discovered in the research, there is one central breach in the narrative and in the collective discourse that completes the structure of the socially constructed nature of LGTBQ students at Laurentian at Georgian. All is breached by a fixation on oppression. It is fear based, very strongly so. These individuals are grasping for some form of network, or support framework, to other constructs besides their own LGTBQ construct. But is it really a framework outside of their own reality? Any community or identity that may be desired by the LGTBQ student body, or thus any form of social appropriation as LGTBQ is purely validated and constructed in the inter-subjective sense. For there to be appropriation, and thus freedom from oppressive master processes of capitalism, this would imply that there is an

of productive symbiosis. For purposes of sanctioned, oppressive reinforcement, it textually is codified to be deviant for those who do not adhere to productive processes, and thus those who engage in homosexual currency, knowledge and the ant-thesis of the production or wealth are discounted and disqualified from the further exchange in society historically. When all is said and done at the end of the day, it is questionable whether labels and judgment actually mean something that important. Again, anything that is constituted by labels and value-based perspectives on any social behaviour is constructed and cultivated. These cultivations serve power relations solely. Throughout my life, especially during periods when I forced my sexuality within, I too was obsessed with fitting in. The relationships I developed by choice were mainly to alleviate any risk of being found out, or to be “outed” by external intentions within my own spheres of influence. It was fear based, very strongly so. In search of finding methods of thwarting any rationale that could have been devised from exploring my internal homosexuality I married, procreated, and thus complied with heteronormative ideology. My existence homogenized by capitalist processes was the product of an inability to find support and resources to exploit in dealing with issues of gender choice and sexual identification. Now, as a student of social science research methodology, my desire to know all

outside objective in this sociological fiction.‫ But as Game suggests, there can be no such outside. There is no possibility of an outside in this form of deconstructive sociology. In this research, the assumption of sexuality as a social construction is challenged in the process of undoing the social and thus knowing the social from within itself. It has involved treating sexuality as a text in itself in order to elaborate how LGTBQ individuals struggle and suffer through their own identity in this construction. The struggle and constant dealing with one’s sexuality is indicative and symbolic of the obsessive nature of society’s need to problematize gender choices regarding gender and sexuality.

there can be understood on the topic of sexual orientation and gender politics overtakes any residual connectivity to earlier spheres of existence, and thus, of resistance. All that has led me in my life has led me to this point where I now explore the social text of sexual identity. I am now as much the textual object and the text as the respondents and their interviews are. And in this realization, there is nothing that can be truly uncovered from these textual accounts. There is nothing that can be mastered from this extrapolation of narrative and discourse. It is all construction just as heteronormativity and capitalist ideology. My own agency in society, my own ability to act according to how I deem useful and relative to the spheres of my social reality is fictitious in this regard. Thus this research exercise has been more to do with questioning my own agency in society, rather than an exploration of sexuality. The sociology of gender and sexuality is more importantly sociology of agency. Obsession, the breach in the fabric of the discourse throughout the interview respondents points towards my own subjective preoccupation with agency, the power to act on my own will. It is this obsession to know how agency can be idealized and constructed but never truly possessed, on which my desire for knowing the social is positioned. For it is not knowledge of the social that supplies power and agency in the relations of ruling, knowledge is only the desire for this knowing.

References:

Game, A. (1991). Undoing the social. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press