Tear gas is a chemical weapon used by the police to put a stop to protests, riots, and other large-scale political actions. It has been employed for over one hundred years, yet our historical and political understanding of the technology is relatively limited. The historical framings of tear gas are dominated by deference to state and military claims and the biomedical literature furthers this one-sided approach to the security technology. At the same time, many groups have fought against tear gas and fought through tear gas as part of the struggle against state politics. The history of tear gas is deeply intertwined with that of policing and questions of state violence against protest movements. A deeper knowledge of tear gas enables us to better understand how and when it is used against protestors as well as how protestors challenge dominant narratives of security.
As a scholar of Science, Technology, and Society, I am interested in understanding the sociotechnical elements of tear gas and how it operates within racial capitalism. This dissertation asks, in what ways has tear gas been used as a security technology mobilized to protect the State from political dissidents and what lessons can be learned from how social movement activists challenged the sociotechnical narratives surrounding tear gas?
This is a social study of a particular security technology that is used in moments of contestation between State forces (military, police, and weapons industry) and radical social movements. I look at two specific kinds of contestation. The first are historical examples of contestations. That is, the interwar historical context in which tear gas emerges and examples from the 1960s through our contemporary political moment where it is used against social movements. The second is the contested space of biomedical knowledge, which has two major narratives associated with it. On the one hand, mainstream medical literature has examined tear gas using military research labs and military test subjects. This selective research has facilitated claims that tear gas is a "less-lethal" weapon that is practically harmless to those it is used on. On the other hand, social movement activists and street medics who are exposed to it on a regular basis have identified some real concerns surrounding its deployment, thereby challenging claims to its harmlessness. / Doctor of Philosophy / Tear gas is a chemical weapon used by the police to put a stop to protests, riots, and other large-scale political actions. It has been used for over one hundred years, yet our historical and political understanding of the technology is relatively limited. It is a highly controlled weapon, and so the public's access to it is mostly limited to when it's used against crowds of political activists. Our understanding of tear gas' effects on the human body is likewise limited. Most of our understanding comes from a small medical literature that studies military cadets, which does not match the population who often gets tear gassed. This dissertation attempts to intervene in that limited understanding and uses the fact that tear gas is predominantly seen in city streets during protests to explore the back and forth dynamic between activists and the police in the United States.
Specifically, I'm interested in how the technology of tear gas and its use by the police tell a story about security in the United States and how activists threaten that security. The first two chapters discuss how the history of tear gas developed the political story of the weapon and the second two chapters look at how medical science has supported this story.
Chapter one looks at tear gas' emergence after World War One and tells the story of how it started to be used against political activists in prisons, jails, and against labor unions. Chapter 2 moves to the radical 1960s up through 2020 to look at how tear gas is used today. What's interesting here is how tear gas interacts with media technologies to structure police public relations programs as well as how activists developed new tactics to fight back.
Chapter 3 changes directions and examines the small, but influential, medical literature on tear gas to evaluate what mainstream science says about the technology's potential health harms. Chapter 4 looks at what strategies and resources activists have developed to ameliorate tear gas and contrasts it with some of the informational gaps in the mainstream medical literature. The introduction and conclusion of the dissertation look at the big picture story of tear gas and its relationship to the political milieu of the United States.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/118926 |
| Date | 08 May 2024 |
| Creators | Leff, Jack Rance |
| Contributors | Science and Technology Studies, Hester, Rebecca, Shew, Ashley, Labuski, Christine, Faulkner, Brandy S. |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf, application/pdf |
| Rights | Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
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