Choose one prompt and respond in the comments.
Prompt 1: How do this week’s readings complicate associations between waste (in literal or metaphoric forms) and what Erving Goffman calls “spoiled identity”? Is this association only negative? Do any of the authors give us a way of viewing this association as powerful or useful? How so?
Prompt 2: Do either the Bond Stockton or Butler excerpts cause you to read Kristeva’s theory of abjection differently? How so?
Prompt 3: Is Sedgwick and Moon’s linking of waste and fat convincing? What are the benefits of this linkage and what are the limitations? What does it allow you to apprehend about waste that you hadn’t previously? (Also feel free to comment on the unusual form of the essay.)
Prompt 3
Sedgwick and Moon’s link between waste and fat seems interesting, if not completely coherent, in the way that both author combine various strands of evidence to convey this point. For example, Moon’s analyzes the rise of fatness as a source of repulsion in nineteenth-century literature:
Dickens is close to the modern nerve with his authentic loathing for the fat female body: the utter inalterable inability to be forgiven, of precariously middle-class fat women like Flora Finching, seems to suggest a literal-minded imaginaire of political economy where the gibbous flesh of such women might be carved directly from the narrow shanks of the smaller body—bodies of children, of the poor—in which Dickens saw himself. (232–233)
Here, he locates a moralizing desire to link fatness with predatory capitalism. Flora Finching, augments her body with those of the working class; she exploits them materially, as a bourgeois woman, and corporeally, as a fat one. Sedgwick, meanwhile, discusses various discourses in the transition from the association of fat bodies with the lower class to the upper class. For example, she presents medicine as “highly elastic and relentlessly naturalizing” to suggest that it does not necessarily exist outside of ideological structures as a source of natural truth (233). Ecology, for Sedgwick, can also align fatness with waste and immorality. She mentions diet books, e.g. Diet for a Small Planet, to demonstrate how we represent “eating high on the food chain” as “ecologically greedy” and wasteful (234).
Though Sedgwick and Moon don’t really combine their analyses into one central, overarching point, the experimental style of the piece mitigates the need for this. In “Divinity: A Dossier,” the authors often explore their own thoughts tangentially. These explorations, though, are sometimes punctuated by quick back-and-forth lines of dialogue (like the rehearsing of clichéd lines about dieting and identity on pp. 227–228), which seem entertaining and depart from more rigid academic ways of writing.
Prompt 3:
I find Sedgwick and Moon’s linking of waste and fat somewhat convincing and interesting. Fat can be connected the notion of “spoiled identity.” Fat people carry shame wit them and some may make a (false) assumption that they get fat as a result of overeating, which can be seen as wasteful. In addition, fat people suffer from the feeling of being left out. However, those who are deemed fat by society have the possibility of detach the identity and waste from them by losing weight. Unlike skin color, body type can be transformed. Unless one goes through the process of sex reassignment surgery, he or she will never be able to change his/her sex. Your race/ethnicity will never change, and whatever stigma attached to your race will follow you for the rest of your life. Today we are no longer surprised to see people struggling to fit into the ideal body type created by culture and society. Another limitation is that society’s view on fat can change anytime. These days more retailers are selling plus size clothing. In some countries, being fat means being beautiful, still. Sedgwick writes “who and what you are means that there’s nothing here for you; your money is not negotiable in this place” (217). By juxtaposing situations where minorities are denied access to what they are looking for, Sedgwick shows that fat people cannot exercise their economic rights, therefore they are stranded “in the circulation of economic value” (217). This explanation allows me to look at fat on the same line with others who are stigmatized in society. I find the article to be discursive in a good way. Sedgwick and Moon discuss a lot about film, and the article reminds me of a screenplay or a script.
Prompt 3
Concerning Kristeva’s theory of abjection, I initially argue that Kristeva spoke from psychological perspective arguing that individual importance, when it came to distinguishing something as abject. Kristeva speaks in first person and places emphasis on the “I” and argues that her idea of abjection “separates me from them.” (2) Even referring to abjection as “a kind of narcissistic crisis” (14) However, after reading Stockton’s book, there is the assumption about what causes abjection in society. Kristeva writes, that cause is not “lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order” ; “what does not respect borders, positions, rules.” (4). Stockton claims that abjection for Kristeva is “a state of being thrown away… from oneself or a group of others.” The expressions of the correlation and separateness between the signs “queer” and “black” adheres to the valuing of shame which in turn “disturbs identity, system, order. Stockton gives numerous examples of film, literature and art which expresses this embracing of shame or the abject that in turn disturbs identity, system and order.
Prompt 3
I find the linking of waste and fat in Divinity: A Dossier convincing, though I do wish that Sedgwick and Moon had spent more time on the comparison. Both authors effectively ground the link with historical background, tracking “the way in which human fat, and especially fat-gendered-female, has represented economic accumulation and waste in post-Enlightenment Western culture” (222-232). This concept of the fat person as an emblem of greed and excess, “where the gibbous flesh of such women might be carved directly from the narrow shanks of the smaller bodies” is thought provoking. The main benefit of this link, it seems, is the way the authors use it to view fatness through an almost queer lens, fatness, like gay and lesbian identities and acts, similarly condemned and cast outside. Divine is known for her association with “filth”—a word that one could easily see associated with what is deemed “perverse” (238). Ultimately, viewing waste alongside fatness and queerness has helped to unveil the breadth of waste as a topic. I am interested in researching this link more.
Prompt 3:
I find Sedgwick and Moon’s linking of waste and fat to be somewhat convincing. Particularly in how they pull the examples of bodies as waste and waste as food from their explanation of John Waters’ Desperate Living (237). Although it’s an example that seems stylized for a particular narrative, Sedgwick and Moon do point out that they feel that “The way in which human fat, and especially fat-gendered females, has represented economic accumulation and waste in post-Enlightenment Western culture is a complicated narrative … When caricatural figures for what Catherine Gallagher refers to as “the fatted body of circulation” would come to be looked for in the bourgeoisie, it was to a very specifically gendered fat body that these meanings were most ineffaceably attached” (232). This links fat and waste in a historical perspective. I’m also reminded of the discussions had about the stigma of those who work with waste garbage such as trash pickers or garbage truck drivers. Much of the same sounding language feels as if it’s being used. “No one would choose it, but it is a labor- wearing, wasting, perhaps necessary, in any case exacted labor, and must be seen and valued as such” (231). This all serves as a further reminder that “waste” as a term is extremely broad and is more than just garbage. Sedgwick takes this further when actually talking about a film that involved human consumption of animal waste with Pink Flamingos and says that “it dramatizes the over-arching premise of the celebrity interview- how it stages the spectacle of divinity eating shit. How it ushers audiences onto an exciting and nauseating scene of creation: the creation of the closet” (229) which brings the discussion further in gender and sex identification. A final note on form, Sedgwick and Moon also don’t have to worry much about concrete transitions and are able to present or list points separately, which puts emphasis on what they are saying.
Prompt #2:
In “Subversive Bodily Acts,” Butler critiques Kristeva, stating that her theory depends “upon the stability and reproduction of precisely the paternal law that she seeks to displace” (80). And so, rather than breaking away from patriarchal hegemony, Kristeva seems to reify and re-affirm the heteronormative standards she seeks to disrupt. Butler asserts that she does so primarily through her “uncritical appropriation of drive theory” (81), which assumes that “the maternal” signifies a pre-discursive state and that discursive states (like law, society, order, etc.) are strictly masculine in their constitutions.
Though Butler’s criticism is mostly directed towards Kristeva’s views regarding the revolutionary potential of poetic language, it appears as though her analysis could also be applied to Kristeva’s notion of “abjection.” In Powers of Horror, Kristeva states that “[a]bjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be” (10). Earlier she states that “what is abject . . . is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses” (2).
Making use of the subtle problematic that Butler traces in Kristeva’s use of drive theory, we might view these remarks as emblematic of the type of thinking that necessarily relegates the abject to the margins of human experience. For Kristeva, the abject symbolizes something that is always-already passed – something that is, from the start, excluded by “primal repression.” In this sense, she reifies the binary structure she is seeking to upset: i.e. the binary structure that places “reason” and “stability” at the center of human experience, and places “abjection” at its margins. By defining the abject as that which brings meaning to collapse is to presuppose that meaning is stable enough to collapse (i.e. that meaning is ever in anything but a state collapse). These are the types of presuppositions that Butler helpfully seeks to suspend in her work.