Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), conventionally known as Teflon, has remarkable properties: it doesn't combine with oxygen; no solvent can corrode it; it doesn't conduct electricity; and it is among the slipperiest substances on earth. Although it is most widely known as a non-stick coating for pots and pans, one of the first applications of the polymer was for seals and gaskets of the separation process of uranium hexafluoride that was key to developing the nuclear bomb. These lesser-known military applications of Teflon are, I argue, part of the slippage from the military to the household. Employing the slipperiness of Teflon as both a quality of its materiality and a provocative concept, this paper will explore how Teflon moved from the large-scale catastrophic fallout of the Manhattan Project to the slow dispersion of everyday toxicity in the home.

This essay is a part of the Roundtable called “The Housewife's Secret Arsenal” (henceforth HSA); a collection of eight object-oriented engagements focusing on particular material instantiations of domesticated war. The title of this roundtable is deliberately tongue-in-cheek reminding readers of the many ways that militarisms can be invisible to their users yet persistent in the form of mundane household items that aid in the labor of homemaking. Juxtaposing the deliberately stereotyped “housewife” with the theater of war raises questions about the quiet migration of these objects and technologies from battlefield to kitchen, or bathroom, or garden. Gathered together as an “arsenal,” their uncanny proximity to one another becomes a key critical tool in asking how war comes to find itself at home in our lives.

Teflon came into the world by accident. In 1938 engineers at the Jackson Laboratory at DuPont had been experimenting with fluorine and its derivatives to create a new refrigerant. When acclaimed researcher and chemist Roy Plunkett returned to see what had become of the experiment, his assistant noticed that no gas had been released from the container it had been sealed in. They were extremely surprised, as these results went against everything they had expected. Using a hacksaw, they opened the cylinder and discovered a white powder. Until that moment, no one knew that the substance they had been working with—tetrafluoroethylene—could be polymerized. Curious about what this new material might be, and what properties it might possess, they began testing. The results were remarkable. They reported that it had the most unusual properties of any material they had ever seen: it didn't combine with oxygen, no solvent could corrode it, it didn't conduct electricity, and it was, until many decades later, the slipperiest substance on earth. While this was a thrilling discovery, the question of its application was not immediately obvious, in part due to the extreme cost of production.

When the United States entered World War II and began to build nuclear weapons, one of the first problems they encountered was the ability to contain uranium hexafluoride, a notoriously corrosive material. Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE or Teflon)'s non-corrosive properties were perfect for precisely this purpose, and so it was manufactured on a large scale to aid in the production of nuclear bombs. Like many new polymers that were developed at that time, these military materials were later to find a home in domestic spaces.¹ PTFE, trademarked by DuPont in 1945 as Teflon, continues to be used for military purposes, as well as in space missions and throughout contemporary infrastructure, but it is best known as the non-stick surface of pots, pans, and muffin tins. How does a material whose first use was essential to the crafting of the nuclear bomb slip into domestic spaces? How does this kind of pervasive violence come to feel at home in the world, and to actually enter our homes?

Drawing on the materiality of Teflon itself, I put forward the concept of slipperiness as a way of describing these militarized flows.² Teflon is the third slipperiest substance on earth—surpassed recently by the chemical alloy BAM and diamond-like carbon—with a coefficient of friction of 0.05 to 0.10. Starting in the 1950s, Teflon began to be used to coat cookware despite the fact that there were known and documented adverse health effects. For example, while the industry continues to maintain that Teflon-coated cookware is a safe material under so-called normal conditions, if a pan is left on the stove and damaged due to heat (a highly likely scenario given that the pans are used for cooking), this may cause it to break down and release toxic fumes into the air. Birds will die upon any exposure to these fumes. Yet chemical companies have slipped out of accountability and obfuscated the toxicity that has come to saturate our most intimate and personal environments. This is in part due to the fact that governmental monitoring systems, such as the United States' Environmental Protection Agency, require chemicals to be proven to be harmful before being removed from the market. Proving cause and effect between a specific chemical and known harm is extremely difficult in domestic environments that are saturated with a multitude of chemicals. For chemical companies wishing to market chemicals with unknown effects on bodies and environments, they are met with relatively no resistance. Corporations are slippery, exploiting lack of oversight and threshold limits to their advantage.

Also, and of equal importance, slipperiness is figured as seductive and alluring, now often understood as a quality of modern convenience. Slipperiness could then be understood as part of the anaesthetization of violence that Nicholas Mirzoeff has described. Mirzoeff writes that during the industrial period, “the degradation of the air is seen as natural, right” (2014, 223). Applied to the quality of slipperiness, Teflon is produced to be aesthetically satisfying, to be associated with the pleasures of non-stick, despite its known toxicity and the harms that may result. Through these mechanisms, the public at large becomes anaesthetized to what our senses might be telling us. Additionally, Teflon and other polymers that were used in the war effort are enmeshed with significations of American strength and pride. While most likely divorced in consumers' minds from these efforts, the feeling of victory seems to nonetheless accompany the ease with which eggs and pancakes glide off the surface. The domestic sphere is the ultimate repository of military technology, providing a retroactive justification that also serves to obscure the relations between the home, warfare, and what Michelle Murphy (2008) has called “chemical regimes of living.”

As Rachel Lee (2020) argues, “border-wall thinking,” which separates warfare chemical exposure from everyday domestic industrial chemical exposure, is a willful misunderstanding of the nature of chemical toxicants and the way they permeate ecosystems. The fiction of the boundedness of the home environment, the supposed separation between the public and private, the imagined site of refuge from the burdens of the world, has been repeatedly shown to be coextensive with, rather than separate from, the harms of our environments. Yet, as Lee goes on to note, this border-wall thinking, “offers a fiction of comfort for elite subjects of the Global North” (2). Even as these same subjects might image that they/we are protected from chemical contamination, toxins nonetheless slip in, under the radar, through desirable qualities and properties. Slipperiness is marketed to ease in reproductive labor, even as cooking and cleaning are then coated in novel chemicals. In the case of Teflon, the small and incremental toxicity that is introduced as a modern convenience often perpetuates the slippage of toxicity downstream. Chemical contamination doesn't stick to the wealthy residents of the Global North in the way that it sticks to others.

The chemicals used to create Teflon, specifically perfluorooctanoic acid, known colloquially as C8, are well documented in their harms to workers and others exposed downstream due to poor disposal practices. In an extensive report on C8 conducted by Sharon Lerner at The Intercept, she describes how chemical harms were known decades before DuPont was forced to stop producing C8. As she writes, “In 1954, the very year a French engineer first applied the slick coating to a frying pan, a DuPont employee named R. A. Dickinson noted that he had received an inquiry regarding C8's 'possible toxicity.' In 1961, just seven years later, in-house researchers already had the short answer to Dickinson's question: C8 was indeed toxic and should be 'handled with extreme care,' according to a report filed by plaintiffs” (Lerner 2015). Despite these known problems, Teflon and C8 continued to be widely used. In fact, C8 continued to slip, sliding to rural farming communities.

Disposal of C8 presented a problem to the company precisely because it was known to be toxic. In the early 1960s, DuPont decided to bury about two hundred drums of the chemical on the banks of the Ohio River near their plant in West Virginia. An internal DuPont document from 1975 about “Teflon Waste Disposal” detailed how the company also packed the waste in drums, put them on barges shipped out to sea, and dumped them in the ocean. The company also disposed of C8 in unlined landfills and directly into the Ohio river (Lerner 2015). Due to these practices, C8 spread throughout the groundwater in the region. According to best estimates, 2.5 million pounds of the chemical were dispersed in the ground and water around Parkersburg, West Virginia, between 1951 and 2003. Slipperiness, evading, hiding, manipulating what the Environmental Protection Agency saw and what it didn't in the disposal of C8, shows how chemical companies slip through regulations, making chemical toxicity less visible. The patterns of this fall on predictable lines, where “chemical harm concentrates in zones of dispossession, that is, zones in which life is rendered not just precarious to chemical effects, but also more disenfranchised and devalued in the larger political economy” (Murphy 2008, 698). In the case of West Virginia, this happened along the lines of class, occupation, and a general abandonment and dispossession of Appalachia. Yet DuPont has remained relatively unscathed: accountability for chemical harm has failed to stick. ³

Part of the inability to make accountability stick to chemical corporations is due to the slipperiness of toxicity in relation to time. Unlike the glamorous and often sublime displays of might that we associate with war, and certainly with the nuclear bomb, the slow violence of chemical leaks suture in queer ways to the military. As Astrida Neimanis writes in relation to mustard gas, but which could equally be applied to C8, “Knowledge of mustard gas thus also inhabits a sort of queer time, where we can only know retrospectively” (72, 2018). The effects of C8 on bodies—bodies of cows or humans or other animals—is often latent, lagging, and then erupts in fast-moving and obscure cancers. Chemical harm is not straight forward in its temporality. It can skip generations, or lay dormant, or emerge violently, often without predictable pathways. One of the deadly effects of C8 is that it does not biodegrade and can accumulate in bodies over time. This slow accumulation can lead to a quick slide into ill health, mimicking the possibilities of acceleration within slipperiness. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 98 percent of Americans have trace amounts of the chemical in their bloodstream (Calafat et al. 2007), but it is unknown when or if those chemicals might result in any direct harm. While this particular chemical has now been banned and DuPont, due to widespread pressure, has ceased production the surfactant chemical used to replace C8 might be just as bad.

Corporations slip out of their responsibilities just as chemical toxicity slides into our most intimate spaces. Yet part of the allure is in precisely this quality of slipperiness, the desire for a friction-free world. By thinking of these chemicals through their military origins, the violence they unleash in the world helps to become clearer, causing moments of friction, a residue that might stick.

¹ For a detailed history of the range of polymers produced during the war, and their subsequent shift to domestic markets, see Jeffrey Miekle's American Plastic (1997).

² For a related concept, see Mark Simpson's (2017) articulation of lubricity that describes the smoothness of oil in petrocultures.“ Lubricity describes the ”texture and mood requisite to the operations of neoliberal petroculture. Lubricity offers smoothness as cultural common sense, promoting the fantasy of a frictionless world contingent on the continued, intensifying use of petro-carbons from underexploited reserves in North America" (2017, 289).

³ Despite DuPont agreeing in 2017 to pay $335.35 million in a class action lawsuits over damages from toxic exposure to C8, it continues to evade accountability, see Mancini (2017) and Morgenson (2020).

Calafat, Antonia M., Lee-Yang Wong, Zsuzsanna Kuklenyik, John A. Reidy, and Larry L. Needham. 2007. "Polyfluoroalkyl Chemicals in the U.S. Population: Data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2003-2004 and Comparisons with NHANES 1999-2000." Environmental Health Perspectives 115 (11): 1596-1602. https://doi.org/10.1289/ehp.10598.

Lee, Rachel. 2020. “A Lattice of Chemicalized Kinship: Toxicant Reckoning in a Depressive-Reparative Mode.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 6 (1): 1-27. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v6i1.33904.

Miekle, Jeffrey. 1997. American Plastic: A Cultural History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Neimanis, Astrida. 2018. “Queer Times and Chemical Weapons, Suspended in the Gotland Deep.” Journal Culture unbound 9 (3). https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.33363.

Simpson, Mark. 2017. “Lubricity: Smooth Oil's Political Frictions.” In Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture, edited by Sheena Wilson, Adam Carlson, and Imre Szeman, 287-318. Montreal, QC, and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen's University Press.

Heather Davis is an Assistant Professor of Culture and Media at The New School in New York whose work draws on feminist and queer theory to examine ecology, materiality, and contemporary art in the context of settler colonialism. Her most recent book, Plastic Matter (Duke University Press, 2022), explores the transformation of geology, media, and bodies in light of plastic's saturation.