As Lucky and as Trashy as the Sun

• In Event: Bad Queers, Bold Crips, and Black Femmes - I: Disability Politics and Cripping Biomedicine

Abstract

Queer theorizing, as a theoretical contribution of a waste segment of humanity, might bring new takes on waste to political ecology. As every ecology on earth springs from the sun’s foundational squandering of its rays, earthly squander too is generative and even originary. My project considers waste as shining, generosity, creation, relationship, spirit, taste, luck, and lifeline, and traces waste-manifestations including bioluminescence, music, sweat, infrared, air, and laughter. I hold out the popular song “That Lucky Old Sun” as a sound text contrasting this model of waste with the capitalist industrial systems that capture excess labor and the waste-related rhetoric that sponsors and enforces marginalization and murder of black, poor, queer, and other disposable humans. "Queer ecologies" are broadly recognized as entangled with waste: abjection, flamboyance, irredeemability, outbursts, seed-spilling, reproductive refusals, poetic excess. But accounts of these “ecologies" seldom go beyond ecological metaphor; while recent multi-species scholarship often disavows intra-human responsibility in its turn to the more-than-human. The industrial ecology motto of “zero-waste” is not a sustainable principle but a death sentence. Where can ecological science practitioners (especially field practitioners) turn, to escape collusion with with such deathly practices? Critical race theory, indigenous studies, black studies, and trans theory provide tools and optics for a reparative encounter with waste as inextricably enmeshed with uncontainable life.

Author

• July Hazard, University of Washington