Normal does not mean right, it does not mean good. Normal is just the loudest. Normality would have us believe that clothes lose their value as they age, that clothes are useless when ripped, that everything must be bought fresh from the store. Victor Lebow says, “the measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumptive patterns,” and I think this quote describes our current relationship to clothing. Clothes are a marker of economic class, of culture, of gender. Clothes help to place us in our social order. However, to look at the oceans of clothes in outlet stores, to see whole floors swallowed by them, trash bags piled on street corners and curbside donation bins, to see the amount of clothes bought and then thrown out, is to see the violence of normality. Normality does not serve us, it serves those in power. When confronted with the realities of clothing waste, the power clothing holds starts to slip.
Author Archives: Leah Wedaman
pollution
I love to paint and one of the most affordable types of paint is acrylics. Acrylics are microplastics: everytime I wash my brushes I’m dumping plastic down the drain, everytime I paint all i’m doing is smearing plastic on cotton. Where is this art gonna end up when I’m dead? What about when I decide my art isn’t worth keeping anymore? It will all be trash. I’m working with materials that will never leave, materials that when returned to the environment do nothing but cause harm. I can make art without polluting. There’s a better way, people have been painting for centuries, way before plastics were ever invented. Maybe I can make my own paint! As an individual I have the time and resources to seek out non-polluting paint alternatives, but it shouldn’t be an individual’s responsibility. Alternet paints should be accessible, they should be sold in stores, they should be cheap enough to afford. That statement can be re-apply to almost anything. Water should be accessible, food should be accessible, housing should be accessible. DAMN! Everytime I run a tap to get water I’m polluting, aren’t I? The plumbing system, what is it powered by? Is it powered by fossil fuels? Everytime I eat, I’m eating foods that have traveled miles on a truck to get to me. Every action to maintain my own life is an act of pollution. We have been made reliant on a system that pollutes. AGHH!
Disposability
Paper-based goods: paper bags in shops, the paper cups and paper to-go boxes in the dining commons, tissues, toilet paper, and paper towels. These objects are designed to be disposable; they can rarely withstand a second use as they begin to disintegrate after the first. They are marketed as convenient and hygienic. Hygienic objects are meant to be disposed of, it is only hygienic if it is away from us. It becomes unhygieniconce it is used.
Where did she come from, where did she go: According to Statista, “the United States imported 3.28 million metric tons of packaging paper and paperboard in 2021.” The graph, also from Statista, shows the “production volume of paper and paperboard in selected countries worldwide in 2010 and 2021”. As shown in the infographic, landfills are largely filled with paper and paper products.
Moore’s conceptualizations
Capitalism is an agent of colonialism. People are conceptualized as waste, inorder to justify their oppression. They are turned into objects so that the moral consideration owed to them is ceased. Capitalism upholds colonial thought and colonial violence. It twists us into something inhuman. Under capitalism people become objects of waste. I think people might be able to fit into every one of Moore’s conceptualizations. But these 3 categorizations stood out to me.
Waste as abject:
“abject posits waste as something that is expelled from the social body in order to shore up the boundaries that divide that which belongs from that which does not.” Positioning a people as some sort of disease, a virus that must be eradicated, cleansed.
Waste as disorder and matter out of place:
“what the media presented along the US-Mexico border during 1991–1994 was an extreme portrait of ‘‘‘matter out of place’’ implicitly borne by the movement of people out of place: Mexican immigrants”… “it is impossible to dismiss the associations drawn between self-soiling Mexicans, mired in their own excrement, and the larger projection of the expanding border, seeping like a swamped septic system’s drainage field across the greater American landscape.” Those in power create a story, a theater. They put on a show, none of what they show us or tell us is real. They have forced migrants into this role.
Waste as resource:
People are used for their labor, for their land, for their children. People are thought of in terms of what they can provide to an empire.
Hidden Waste
Storage closets. There’s a closet behind the lecture hall in FPH filled with books, old newspapers, tapes, and electronics. A layer of dust covers everything. Closets are made to hide what is inside them. Of course closets usually hold things that aren’t considered waste but they still work to supporate. All this stuff, because it’s been put in an accessible place, because no one knows about it, because it’s behind unmarked doors, has sorta become waste. No one uses it, it rots in cardboard boxes, it gathers dust. And it is only allowed to exist in this state because it is kept out of sight. Distance, even on this small scale of a closet and its forgotten contents, is a work of distance.
Distance is a tool used by the oppressor. That’s why they work so hard to maintain it. The people with power have separated themselves from the rest of the world. The pain created by the same systems they benefit from has been made invisible to them. Distance makes the whole system possible. We get closer and closer to waste the more we are considered waste ourselves within the hierarchy.
Personal responsibility
Food waste. I think food waste is a category of waste that I feel most personally responsible for. I try hard not to waste food, and I feel like a shit bag everytime I do. I feel bad when I go to a restaurant and the table next to me is full of the scraps of another person’s meal, and I’m not allowed to eat it, I have to let the waiter take it away and throw it in the trash. And then I have to order my own food, when I would have been fine with the food from another person’s table. My uneaten food becomes someone else’s responsibility the second it is out of my sight. It shouldn’t be like that. I don’t want to think like that. I’m a damn sheep in an oppressive system! A sheep! And I hate it! I don’t know who deals with my food waste next, and I think that has been deliberately done. Look what individualism has done to us. Individuality is a made up idea that does not exist in nature. Separation is how they control us. They have stolen us from each other! And then they pretend we have a choice. If it isn’t accessible to the BIPOC community, to the poor, or the disabled, then it’s not real. They have forced me into complacency! I will never forgive them for it.
Michael F. Maniates writes “When responsibility for environmental problems is individualized, there is little room to ponder institutions, the nature and exercise of political power, or ways of collectively changing the distribution of power and influence in society”. They make it inescapable. Only those with privilege can separate themself.
Dumpster Diving
I found it in the dumpsters behind the colorful houses. It’s a small glass jar. I liked its shape. I’m going to use it to hold bobby pins.
I felt like a bird hunting. I think that might sound crazy, but that’s what I felt like. And it was fun. But I also didn’t want anyone to see me. I didn’t want anyone to catch me rummaging through the dumpsters. So I moved quickly. And I didn’t want to leave but I was scared someone would walk by at any moment so I left before I could look through everything.
A line from Diving into the Wealth of Food Waste in America by Alex V. Barnard reads, “These corporations promote disposable goods over reusable ones, design rapidly obsolete products, and ensure that repair is more expensive than replacement.” I think this glass container was treated as waste because it was produced to be waste. Waste is necessary for capitalism to function, as Barnard explains, “waste is thus not an ‘externality’ or ‘failure’ of the market but a source of value and driver of production in a capitalist system”. Capitalists profit off of disposable products. Although this glass jar is reusable, it is more profitable when thought of and treated as disposable. So we as consumers have been trained to view it as such.
SHIT
For racism and imperialism to work there needs to be as much separation between the oppressor and the oppressed as can be manufactured. The oppressed must be turned into something subhuman inorder to justify violence. Or the oppressor must become something greater than human, so that those once perfectly human activities can be villainized. The requirements for entry are always changing. They are created to be ever inaccessible. When poop became used to justify racism, the value of poop vanished. Our current waste management is so shit, our human/planet health is so shit because of racism. The health of the earth is the plaything of racism and imperialism. When we hurt each other the earth is hurt in the process. How many of our modern day beliefs around ‘health’ are rooted in racism?
Poop is our connection to the world. The world moves through us! It is a circle, we give back the life that sustains us. We are all interconnected.
Hoarding
I have PRODUCTS! Soaps, shampoos, conditioners, lotions, creams, ointments, serums, gels, man i’m insane. I have beauty and hygiene products I don’t even use, that I haven’t used in months. And I’m always buying more. This must be hoarding, this is definitely hoarding. The thought of parting with them makes me anxious. And some of them aren’t even good for me. The macadamia-nut body butter gave me hives! But I buy them because they’re all so pretty, they smell so good, and they make ME feel all pretty. I know their dirty little liars, and I know beauty is a made up idea rooted in white supremacy, so why do I still have them!? Because I want what they promise. They promise me they’ll make me healthy, and pretty, and acceptable, lovable even. And it’s harder to stand all alone.
I would say I have a cleaning routine but it can’t be all that efficient if I still have all these damn products. My routine doesn’t often extend to my things: my products, my clothes, my books, my papers. I take it for granted that they belong. That’s something I can change! Every couple of months I can go through my belongings and clear out what I’m not consistently using. But the things I can’t donate, or repurpose, or gift, will be thrown in the trash. And there’s gotta be something else I can do! Something other than that.
Matter Out Of Place
Wrappings; the thin filmy plastics, the cardboard boxes, everything I pull away or rip apart before I can get what I really want. This matter doesn’t fit neatly into a classification, into an action. When I hold it in my hand I don’t know what to do with it. I have no immediate use for it, I don’t see where it can fit; I haven’t been given a reason to care for it. Also, this object has served its purpose, it’s lived its life, it’s done what it was intended to do, so now it belongs gone. It was intended to protect an object, to keep an object pure and fresh for my consumption. Damn! Is that the point of packaging!? Well that’s disgusting. If someone talked about a human that way I would kill them! So why are objects allowed to be talked about like that? An object is not a person, but they are made by human hands, thought up by human minds, they are an extension of humanity. Why do I owe them less? AND it’s the thought itself that’s so disgusting. Ownership. There is no such thing. There should be no such thing.