Void Ecologies: Resistance, Commoning and Pleasure in the Discard Space
This dissertation explores the cultural, theoretical and historical ties between discard spaces (or spaces left “outside systems of spatial configuration and signification” (Dibazar 2016, 212) and practices of re-commoning (or reclaiming resources) that address environmental, racial and gendered injustices. I examine discard spaces as heterotopias according to David Harvey’s expanded, materialist definition, as not only “axiomatic spaces of difference,” (Gandy 2012, 732) but as “liminal, social [and] foundational for the defining of revolutionary trajectories” (2012, xvii). I argue, as Silvia Federici has, that these spaces are not utopian enclaves, but militant “spaces from which to reclaim the power to transform our lives” (2019, 168). The dissertation moves from material (food waste) to abstract (body fluid) discard re-commoning to exemplify its potential to challenge capitalist enclosure across multiple scales. Re-commoning in the voids produced by colonial modernity, I argue, can provide material and theoretical footing for ongoing struggles against manufactured scarcity, ecological devastation, and quotidian alienation. By tracing the grassroots reclamation of discards across speculative, embodied and spatial dimensions in a sixty-year period (1964-2024), I demonstrate how these practices facilitate the development of “commoner” materially-linked consciousnesses that undermine and move in defiance of profit logic.
American Literature, American Popular Culture, Literature in English, North America, Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority, Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Other Film and Media Studies, Political History, Queer Studies, United States History, Visual Studies, environmental justice, discard studies, queer ecology, feminist literature and performance, history of social movements
City University of New York - Graduate Center
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