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ABSTRACT
Pittsburgh consistently ranks as one of the worst U.S. cities for air pollution. This article analyzes qualitative, semi-structured interviews with thirty-three participants throughout the Greater Pittsburgh Area to examine how people express what they are feeling in their bodies when exposed to pollution. Analyzing these data with an affective and materialist lens, I illustrate how participants identify smell as a sign of uncertainty and try to gain certainty through community agreement and/or empirical data. In accounting for a pollution-related stench, participants drew upon smell as a powerful rhetorical force that produces and circulates meaning through bodies. Ultimately, I argue that smell, and the uncertainties it can raise, shapes how people make sense of the world around them and becomes a rallying point for describing the sensations and feelings of living in a polluted environment. Thus, smell is an important factor for how people create and circulate meaning. This article highlights how everyday people, especially those who are underrepresented and marginalized, make sense of environmental violence in and through their bodies. Rhetoricians, politicians, and scientists alike should account for these forms of olfactory persuasion as they seek to understand the effects of environmental pollution.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Stephanie R. Larson for her thoughtful feedback as he developed this article for publication. He would also like to thank Stacey K. Sowards and the anonymous reviewers for their generous time and efforts toward improving the article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Vintage, 2001), 82.
2 Mayor Lawrence’s efforts included smoke ordinances, transportation regulations, and polishing grime off buildings.
3 Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009); Robert Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Dorceta E. Taylor, Toxic Communities (New York: New York University Press, 2014).
4 James P. Fabisiak et al., “A Risk-Based Model to Assess Environmental Justice and Coronary Heart Disease Burden from Traffic-Related Air Pollutants,” Environmental Health 19 (2020): 1.
5 A lawsuit regarding this fire at the Clairton Coke Works rose to class-action status in May 2023 because the fire raised public health alerts throughout the area and ruined the facility’s sulfur pollution controls.
6 For more information on citizen science in the modern age, see Ruha Benjamin, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022). Benjamin specifically examines how small changes and habits can have larger impacts.
7 Ian T. Cousins et al., “Outside the Safe Operating Space of a New Planetary Boundary for Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS),” Environmental Science & Technology 56, no. 16 (2022): 11172.
8 Mary Kosuth, Sherri A. Mason, and Elizabeth V. Wattenberg, “Anthropogenic Contamination of Tap Water, Beer, and Sea Salt,” PloS one 13, no. 4 (2018): e0194970.
9 Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism; Joshua Trey Barnett, “Toxic Portraits: Resisting Multiple Invisibilities in the Environmental Justice Movement,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 2 (2015): 405–25.
10 Heather M. Zoller, “Communicating Health: Political Risk Narratives in an Environmental Health Campaign,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 40, no. 1 (2012): 20–43.
11 Emily Winderman, Robert Mejia, and Brandon Rogers, “‘All Smell Is Disease’: Miasma, Sensory Rhetoric, and the Sanitary-Bacteriologic of Visceral Public Health,” Rhetoric of Health & Medicine 2, no. 2 (2019): 115–46.
12 Jenell Johnson, “‘A Man’s Mouth Is His Castle’: The Midcentury Fluoridation Controversy and the Visceral Public,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 102, no. 1 (2016): 1–20; Winderman, Mejia, and Rogers, “‘All Smell Is Disease’”; Stephanie R. Larson, What It Feels Like: Visceral Rhetoric and the Politics of Rape Culture (University Park: Penn State Press, 2021); Ryan Mitchell, “‘Whatever Happened to Our Great Gay Imaginations?’: The Invention of Safe Sex and the Visceral Imagination,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 107, no. 1 (2021): 26–48.
13 Hsuan L. Hsu, The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics (New York: New York University Press, 2020); Alex C. Parrish, “Gustatory and Olfactory Rhetorics,” in The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics: A Hoot in the Light (New York: Springer Nature, 2021), 157–86.
14 Hsu, The Smell of Risk, 6.
15 Johnson, “‘A Man’s Mouth Is His Castle.’”
16 Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Breathing Aesthetics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), 1.
17 For more rhetorical scholarship involving breath, see Noor Ghazal Aswad, “Cultivating Radical Care and Otherwise Possibilities at the End of the World,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 110, no. 2 (2024): 313–19; Matthew Houdek, “In the Aftertimes, Breathe: Rhetorical Technologies of Suffocation and an Abolitionist Praxis of (Breathing in) Relation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 108, no. 1 (2022): 48–74; Matthew Houdek and Ersula J. Ore, “Cultivating Otherwise Worlds and Breathable Futures,” Rhetoric, Politics & Culture 1, no. 1 (2021): 85–95.
18 Stephanie R. Larson, “‘Everything Inside Me Was Silenced’:(Re) Defining Rape through Visceral Counterpublicity,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 104, no. 2 (2018): 123–44.
19 For example, Debra Hawhee, “Looking into Aristotle’s Eyes: Toward a Theory of Rhetorical Vision,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 14, no. 2 (2011): 139–65; Barnett, “Toxic Portraits.”
20 Winderman, Mejia, and Rogers, “All Smell Is Disease.”
21 Debra Hawhee, “Rhetoric’s Sensorium,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 2–17.
22 Winderman, Mejia, and Rogers, “All Smell Is Disease,” 121.
23 E. Cram, Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2022).
24 Jean Duruz and Gaik Cheng Khoo, Eating Together: Food, Space, and Identity in Malaysia and Singapore (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014); Jennifer Lin LeMesurier, Inscrutable Eating: Asian Appetites and the Rhetorics of Racial Consumption (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2023).
25 Parrish, “Gustatory and Olfactory Rhetorics.”
26 Diane Davis, Inessential Solidarity (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010); Diane Davis, “Creaturely Rhetorics,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 44, no. 1 (2011): 88–94.
27 Kendall Gerdes, “Trauma, Trigger Warnings, and the Rhetoric of Sensitivity,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 49, no. 1 (2019): 13.
28 George A. Kennedy, “A Hoot in the Dark: The Evolution of General Rhetoric,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 25, no. 1 (1992): 1–21.
29 Michael K. Middleton, Samantha Senda-Cook, and Danielle Endres, “Articulating Rhetorical Field Methods: Challenges and Tensions,” Western Journal of Communication 75, no. 4 (2011): 386–406; Sara L. McKinnon et al., eds., Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method (University Park: Penn State Press, 2016); Candice Rai, Democracy’s Lot: Rhetoric, Publics, and the Places of Invention (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016); Mack Shelley et al., Field Rhetoric: Ethnography, Ecology, and Engagement in the Places of Persuasion (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2018); Samantha Senda-Cook et al., eds., Readings in Rhetorical Fieldwork (New York: Routledge, 2019).
30 Kathy Charmaz and Liska Belgrave, “Qualitative Interviewing and Grounded Theory Analysis,” The SAGE Handbook of Interview Research: The Complexity of the Craft, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2012), 347–65; Barney G. Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss, Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research (New York: Routledge, 2017).
31 Herbert J. Rubin and Irene S. Rubin, Qualitative Interviewing: The Art of Hearing Data (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2011), 202.
32 Kennedy, “A Hoot in the Dark,” 3–4.
33 Gerdes, “Trauma, Trigger Warnings, and the Rhetoric of Sensitivity.”
34 Debra Hawhee, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Jenny Rice, “The Rhetorical Aesthetics of More: On Archival Magnitude,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 50, no. 1 (2017): 26–49; Christa J. Olson, “American Magnitude: Frederic Church, Hiram Bingham, and Hemispheric Vision,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 48, no. 4 (2018): 380–404; Stephanie R. Larson, “‘Just Let This Sink in’: Feminist Megethos and the Role of Lists in #MeToo,” Rhetoric Review 38, no. 4 (2019): 432–44.
35 Environmental Protection Agency, “History of Reducing Air Pollution from Transportation in the United States,” 2022, https://www.epa.gov/transportation-air-pollution-and-climate-change/history-reducing-air-pollution-transportation.
36 Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism; Nixon, Slow Violence; Taylor, Toxic Communities.
37 Specific names of the two mills mentioned were redacted to help maintain anonymity.
38 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).
39 Jenny Edbauer Rice, “The New ‘New’: Making a Case for Critical Affect Studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 2 (2008): 200–12; Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion; Hawhee, “Rhetoric’s Sensorium”; Larson, “Everything Inside Me Was Silenced”; M. Remi Yergeau, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
40 Hawhee, “Rhetoric’s Sensorium.”
41 Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Johnson, “A Man’s Mouth Is His Castle”; Larson, “Everything Inside Me Was Silenced”; Winderman, Mejia, and Rogers, “All Smell Is Disease.”
42 John Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1982); Ewa Glapka, “Critical Affect Studies: On Applying Discourse Analysis in Research on Affect, Body and Power,” Discourse & Society 30, no. 6 (2019): 600–21.
43 Taylor, Toxic Communities.
44 See 2020 census data at https://datausa.io/profile/geo/clairton-pa/.
45 Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism, 6.
46 Nixon, Slow Violence.