Feminist Studies

Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc.  jennifer a. wagner-lawlor Regarding Intimacy, Regard, and Transformative Feminist Practice in the Art of Pamela Longobardi The Trashing of The planeT by plastic pollution has finally started to make it to mainstream news outlets. The year 2016 brought the World Economic Forum projection that by 2050 there will be more plastic by weight in the world’s oceans than fish. It brings further news that trillions of plastic microbeads from toothpaste and facial and body washes have entered our waterways and our food stream. More citizens now recognize the existence of the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch, described colorfully if erroneously as a “plastic island” the size of Texas.1 Such news stories fuel awareness of the toxic impacts of plastic pollution 1. World Economic Forum, Ellen MacArthur Foundation, and McKinsey & Company, “The New Plastics Economy—Rethinking the Future of Plastics,” January 19, 2016, https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/publications /the-new-plastics-economy-rethinking-the-future-of-plastics. See also John Schwartz, “Ban on Microbeads Proves Easy to Pass Through Pipeline,” New York Times, December 22, 2015; and the website of the Plastic Pollution Coalition , www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is located in the North Pacific Ocean and covers an area much larger than surface area of Texas. The story of the discovery of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is recounted in Capt. Charles Moore, Plastic Ocean: How a Sea Captain’s Chance Discovery Launched a Determined Quest to Save the Oceans (New York: Avery Books, 2011). I use the term “plastic pollution” throughout this essay rather than “marine debris,” which is a euphemism that displaces human responsibility for this ecological disaster. 650 Jennifer A.Wagner-Lawlor to human bodies, particularly through the endocrine-disruptive chemicals plastic is composed of, and to all manner of nonhuman bodies, from entangled sea and land creatures to clogged and fouled bodies of water. Plastic uniquely manifests the generative agency of late capitalism; what Heather Davis refers to as “the substrata of advanced capitalism.”2 Capable of taking the shape of any consumer desire, plastic is a fetishized distillation, materially and conceptually, of modern capitalism’s relentless drive to master nature and to homogenize all forms of difference. From Roland Barthes’ remarkable 1957 essay “Plastic,” to Susan Freinkel ’s eye-opening work Plastic: A Toxic Love Story, cultural commentators have flagged our entanglement with a myth of plastic, constructed and aggressively maintained by global extraction and chemical industries .3 Plastic’s own life cycle begins when it becomes functionally useful as a commodity or container. Once used or empty, the life cycle seems to end; without further use-value, plastic is discarded, physically removed beyond the borders of society itself, to join an illusionary place called “away.” The conceptual dematerializing of waste is a compensatory fiction, however, justifying the excesses of a modern consumer culture .4 Plastic in particular possesses unique material properties: plastic 2. Heather Davis “Life and Death in the Anthropocene: A Short History of Plastic,” in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, ed. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015), 349. 3. Roland Barthes, “Plastic,” in his Mythologies: The Complete Edition, in a New Translation, trans. Richard Howard and Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012); Susan Freinkel, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011). See also, Brian C. Black, Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Brian C. Black, Crude Reality: Petroleum in World History (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012); Davis, “Life and Death in the Anthropocene”; and Stephen Fenichell, Plastic: The Making of a Synthetic Century (New York: HarperCollins, 1996). 4. See Jody Baker, “Modeling Industrial Thresholds: Waste at the Confluence of Social and Ecological Turbulence.” Cultronix 1 (1994), http://cultronix. eserver.org/baker. Baker notes that because of “the imperialist nature of industrial capitalism,” there are “virtually no places left which have not been incorporated into its production process. . . . The problem is compounded because if the entire world becomes colonized then there is no outside, no geographical other, no place left...