Infertile Environments

“Janelle Lamoreaux’s Infertile Environments is a beautifully written book that has the virtues of a classic ethnography, both providing specificity of time and place and shedding light on broader trends at the intersection of science and society and enduring epistemological and ontological questions. The five palimpsests of Nanjing epigenetic toxicology—national, hormonal, dietary, maternal, and laboratory environments—work beautifully to highlight what is at stake in modern toxic exposures and their effects on gendered reproductive ability. In addition, Lamoreaux situates the book through concise and generously cited accounts of scholarship on reproductive technologies and on the history of modern Chinese biology.” - Charis Thompson, author of Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research

“Janelle Lamoreaux’s deep ethnographic dive into genotoxicity not only reinvents biological anthropology and environmental studies; it offers us a whole new perspective on reproductive politics. This is a brilliant must-read with profound implications for how we understand race, sex, gender, and nation as well as science, food, and DNA.” - Sarah Franklin, author of Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship

"What does the wide-scale environmental contamination poisoning China’s water, air, and food mean for our understandings of science, kinship, and reproduction in the twenty-first century?. . . Lamoreaux combines traditional laboratory ethnography with extensive reading of scientific and popular literature to argue that a distinctively Chinese variety of 'epigenetics' might be able to answer this question." - Katherine A. Mason, Journal of Asian Studies

"Infertile Environments is concise and approachable, deftly rendering complex topics in the fields of environmental epigenetics, reproductive toxicology, medical and reproductive anthropology, and science and technology studies (STS)." - Jessica P. Cerdeña, Journal of Anthropological Research

"Janelle Lamoreaux’s timely ethnography greatly contributes to . . . our understanding of the intersections between postgenomic sciences, environmental toxicities, and health. . . . Infertile Environments provides lasting contributions to medical and environmental anthropology, as well as feminist science studies."