There is politics in your shampoo On youth activism, endocrine disruption, and making everyday toxicity visible in France

This ethnographic research is about young people navigating toxicity in a time of environmental crisis. It pays a close and attentive look at what a growing number of youths are doing in France in order fight toxicants off their bodies and living spaces. To keep toxicants at bay, young people in this study make their own cleaning products, replace plastic with glass, quit taking contraceptive pills, cook pesticide-free meals, and engage in environmental activism, both online and through grassroots theatre and workshops. Collective and individual practices eloquently reflect young people’s understandings of everyday toxicity—often articulated as the presence of endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs)—and of its differential distribution through things, bodies, places, and time. By doing this, youths counter the invisibility of toxicants like EDCs, making everyday toxicity into a tangible, graspable problem, a problem about which something can and should be done.