Living Feminist Lives in a Garbage Patch

Feminist work hard to fight against damaging narratives. These are stories designed to harm or limit us. They stymie our imagination and vision of what the world can be. 

Sometimes we get called killjoys because of this. But the "joy" we kill is built upon pain, violence, and damage. We see this in narratives such as: Girls don't like sports. Women are bad at math. She asked for it. Feminists refute such world-constraining stories. In their place, we fashion realities that are caring, restorative, and life-affirming. 

Dr. Weeks models the work of writing better stories in her review of Synthetic Frontiers, published in the Oakland Review of Books. She shares how feminist science & technology studies scholar Kim De Wolff deconstructs the story of the Great Garbage Patch in her book, Synthetic Frontiers: Ocean Plastics and the Persistence of Trash Islands. Imagining plastics pollution as 'out there,' viewable and floating in the Pacific Ocean obscures the more pervasive and damaging presence of microplastics in our everyday lives.

As Dr. Weeks writes, we are all living in the great garbage patch. 

The garbage patch is the endocrine disruptors released in Cancer Alley that harm entire communities. The garbage patch is hormone shifts, such as puberty and menopause, at increasingly young ages. The garbage patch is frog population decline. The garbage patch is cultural erasure under waste colonialism.

What we thought was a patchy phenomenon is perpetual and pervasive. While disturbing, and perhaps a killjoy, knowing this enables us to put our energy into efforts that address the full scope of the problem. This can motivate us to pursue new and more radical solutions. 

So let's get our vision fixed. Read Dr. Week's review in Oakland Review of Books or get the book, available open access from MIT Press.