Plastic Terra - the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as emergent queer dys/utopia and speculative trans world

• In Event: Decolonial Queer and Trans Ecologies Part 2 (HYBRID)

Abstract

This paper emerges from an ongoing social practice project with the International Bird Rescue, Otis College of Art + Design, and Synchromy Music focusing on injured marine birds, the people who care for them, and the larger contaminated ecosystems that hold them. As part of this project, I will be in residency at the International Bird Rescue from January 2025 through July 2026, studying the clinic’s practices and their birds in care and the messages about the larger Pacific Ocean ecosystem that these marine birds carry with them to the clinic. The project will include a site visit to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and culminate in a series of site-specific performances based on this research in June 2026, in addition to this paper.

Plastic Terra explores the theoretical and poetic worlds of the Plasticene, through this extended engagement with International Bird Rescue, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and the marine birds who live on and with it. It considers the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as an emergent plastic terra or trans world beyond the reach of our immediate human vision, where the discarded scraps of western consumerist culture are assembling themselves into new floating, impure ground, for new forms of plastic life. It also examines the queerness and transness of these new forms of life evolving and adapting in this plastic terra, including plastic-metabolizing creatures who are rebuilding their bodies and nests using this synthetic material and sequentially hermaphroditic fish and other sea life who have adapted to survive extreme environmental shocks by changing sex and/or reproductive strategies.

Starting with Jose Esteban Munoz’s writing on queer futurity and Heather Davis’ Toxic Progeny: The plastisphere and other queer futures, this essay will explore whether and how this plastic terra might be theorized as a speculative trans utopia - a place so impure and detested that trans refugees fleeing the flames of anti-plastic, anti-trans, bio-essentializing, fear-baiting panic scorching through the United States now might imagine it as safe. Then, thinking with Karen Barad’s brittlestar and Eva Hayward’s seastar, it will examine the mutating life forms that are living and dying on this plastic terra as the seeds of some trans ecological future where the discarded and detested do not just die and leach out their pollution onto the world around them, but also rest, adapt, find new mutualistic relationships with other detested and discarded forms of life, transform, and heal. It will conclude with a new materialist perspective on plastic’s agency, engaging with Mel Y. Chen’s Toxic Animacies and Allison Cobb’s Plastic: An Autobiography, to ask: can this graveyard of consumerism so far removed from the densities of human activity we are accustomed to on land be reimagined as an experimental ecosystem where everything is broken, yes, but also, in a sense, free?

Author

• Ashton Phillips, Otis College of Art + Design