The Standard Man and a Nuclear Family: Dosimetry, Racialized Irradiation and the Human

The Standard Man and a Nuclear Family: Dosimetry, Racialized Irradiation and the Human

Presented by the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society

Tracing the afterlife of atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this talk explores the construction of the Standard Man through the imperial archive of racialized sufferings of hibakusha, or “person affected by a bomb,” alongside poetic digestions of the bomb and its lasting impact on racialized bodies. I demonstrate the centrality of establishing a normative, standard body through the white, heteronormative “Standard Man” and his fictional, normative life in developing radiation dosimetry, to underscore the new science’s dependence on racialized suffering and non-normative lives. The science of radiation dosimetry underwent a drastic change since 1945, from one focused on the medical and laboratory use of radiation to one of large-scale exposure based on wartime and experimental atomic bomb detonations. Alongside this scientific development of a fictional body, I situate poet April Naoko Heck’s A Nuclear Family and its exploration of the lasting impact of the bomb across generations beyond the hibakusha populations, or those with first-hand experiences with the bombs, as she elucidates the effects of the bomb and radiation in the body, memory and life through her matrilineal history stemming from her hibakusha great-grandmother. Embedded in this lineage are physical digestions of the bomb, from irradiated foods to burnt etchings on the skin from the blast to metaphorical digestions of the “nuclear family” as a modern conception of the normative family life. Bringing together the history of the science of radiation dosimetry with metaphorical digestions of atomic bombs, this paper situates the change in dosimetry, radiation “protection” and the development of the “Standard Man,” in a poetic exploration of racialized violence of atomic bomb detonations and ensuing acute, chronic and generational radiation exposures in A Nuclear Family. In so doing, it underscores the role racialized marginality plays in solidifying the Human.