Herring articulates a tension between the positive affect of so-called “hoarders” towards their possessions and the negative affect of a society that has “pathologized those who hold on to their stuff for too l […]
I was particularly struck by the two Warhols examined by Hal Foster in “The Return of the Real”: White Burning Car III and Ambulance Disaster. The top image of the latter can be seen as a screen posing as the rea […]
Prompt 1: In “Queer Ecology,” Timothy Morton argues that Butler’s call for multivocal gender performativity already exists in nature; that across species, heteronormativity is neither inherently “natural” nor even […]
In Picking Up, Robin Nagel describes and critiques the invisibility of sanitation work and workers, in marked contrast the tremendous importance of their work. Nagel goes to great lengths to demonstrate her […]
1. Huyssen writes that it is “Difficult to walk the line between sentimental lament over a loss and the critical reclaiming of a past for the purposes of constructing alternative futures” (7). Is […]
Reno makes numerous references to the potential for masculine empowerment in the act of scavenging. In what ways is scavenging gendered, and is this inherent or simply manifest? Is there potential for a similar […]
This passage from “Spring and All” utilizes a gendered vocabulary that enacts a separation of masculine and feminine, and ultimately privileges the former. The “MAN of imagination” (emphasis mine) is opposed […]
Reno’s summary seems to be a fair one. Douglas describes dirt as “the byproduct of systematic ordering and classification of matter,” which implies that dirt is part of the system itself; whereas Krist […]
I lived for a number of years in Portland, during which time a residential composting program was piloted and then rolled out county-wide. Food scraps and other organic materials were added to the […]
