Milwaukee, Wisconsin has struggled with an epidemic of childhood lead poisoning for decades. Efforts to address this issue have waxed and waned over the years, in time with funding availability and political interest and although there has been a dramatic reduction in the number of children affected since the 1970s, the issue stubbornly persists. This is particularly true in the near North and South side neighborhoods of the city, where the majority of the city’s African American and Lantinx populations live. In 2016 13.2% of Milwaukee’s black children tested with elevated blood lead levels, a rate four times the national average for all children (Shain 2021). In the wake of the Flint Water Crisis, the publication of these numbers sparked community concerns about the possibility of tap water contamination in Milwaukee, which has some 70,000 lead service lines (Lynch and Meier 2020). These concerns have resulted in experiences of water insecurity, particularly in the African American neighborhoods on the near North Side of the city, where lead poisoning rates are highest, and the homes are most likely to have lead service lines and internal plumbing, due to the age of the housing stock. Broadly speaking, this dissertation is part of an ongoing effort in the water insecurity literature to expand studies of water insecurity beyond the Global South into the Global North (Ranganathan and Balazs 2015). Water insecurity refers to contexts in which access to necessary water is denied as a result of quality, infrastructure, scarcity, and/or sociopolitical barriers (Balazs and Ray 2014; Hadley and Wutich 2009; Jepson and Vandewalle 2016; Sullivan, Meigh, and Giacomello 2003). In the case of Milwaukee, water insecurity is occurring not as a result of hydrological scarcity, but due to power inequities and toxic infrastructure. Acknowledging that power inequities most often disadvantage women, children, minorities, and the poor, I use Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) as a framework for this research to understand how women, children and minorities are differentially affected by resource inequalities and environmental degradation (Elmhirst 2011; Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter, and Wangari 1996a; Truelove 2011). FPE asks how and why these intersectional inequalities occur and seeks possible solutions to them (Elmhirst 2011; Sultana 2020). This dissertation addresses three main objectives. First, I seek to understand how perceptions of water insecurity and toxic contamination differ between stakeholder groups due to the intersectional impacts of infrastructural violence on experiences of water insecurity and environmental toxicity. Specifically, how tap water insecurity fits into the larger story of contamination resulting from a pervasively leaded environment. Second, I ask how gender role differences manifest at the intrahousehold scale when coping with living with water insecurity and the ways in which this may be reinforcing or altering gender norms. Finally, I analyze how conditions of toxic uncertainty and (subsequent water insecurity) perpetuate the neoliberal responsibilization of public health education in racialized and gendered ways. These three objectives are connected by an overarching theme of responsibility: at the heart of each is the question of who should bear the responsibility for various aspects of the lead epidemic and an examination of where that burden actually falls.
Read
