Elizabeth V. Spelman
The subtitle of Lugones’s extraordinary collection Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes is Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. Readers of Lugones’s work might wonder if she chose this subtitle only with considerable reluctance. Its telescoping conciseness perhaps assures readers who might be puzzled by the title that they will be in familiar conceptual and political territory: “theory,” “coalition,” and “oppression” are eminently keyword-worthy. But it is a measure of the forces against which Lugones has been in continuous struggle that those concepts—especially oppression—may seem all too inviting: they promise but are unlikely to deliver an opening for resistance and liberation. In what follows I briefly review some of Lugones’s reservations about the work performed by the notions of oppression and the oppressed. I then go on to suggest that concepts hinted at but not fully articulated in her work—“trash,” “waste,” “disposable,” and the like—provide a vocabulary that direct us to sources of resistance she takes the language and the structure of oppression to occlude.
Toward the conclusion of “Tactical Strategies of the Streetwalker/Estrategias Tácticas de la Callejera,” Lugones remarks:
I end with a reflection of what pulls us into a frenzy of recognizable political activity, recognizable in dominant terms. Street-level sociality can provide a despairing, demoralizing “picture” of the complexities and depth of oppression and of the barriers to emancipatory change. There is a desire to imbue oneself with a sense of power against this demoralization. Not infrequently, the pedestrian theorist is tempted to favor a mode of comportment that speaks the languages of systems of oppression, seeking within them redress or assistance. This temptation, seduction, is understandable and ubiquitous. We feel a need to demand equality, respect, and justice within a particular dominant construal of sense, even if that sense—conceptually, materially—requires that equality, respect and justice be mechanisms congruent with fragmentation and domination. (TSC 229)
The very notion of oppression appears to open up a space in which the oppressed are both recognized and attended to: the systemic and suffocating domination, abuse and exploitation to which people are subjected is acknowledged, presumably as part of projects to end such violence. But Lugones worries that attention framed in such terms comes at a high price. Oppressive systems—including the tools they provide for reflexive examination—thrive on truncated, reductive portrayals of the oppressed that obscure their existence as “subjects, lively beings, resisters” (IP 18):
If we think of people who are oppressed as not consumed or exhausted by oppression, but also as resisting or sabotaging a system aimed at molding, reducing, violating, or erasing them, then we also see at least two realities: one of them has the logic of resistance and transformation; the other has the logic of oppression. (IP 12)
These two “logics” typically are in interplay; it is not as if a person is (or is to be understood as) simply oppressed or is (or is to be understood as) simply engaged in resistance. Nonetheless, oppressors intent on enjoying the fruits of oppression have a lot at stake in “not seeing sabotage and resistance,” even though in order to get rid of such pushback they’d have to see it (15).2 To not only take off the blinders that protect them from such awareness, but to come to understand what they then would face, they’d have to learn to “travel” to the world of the resisters, be open to seeing not just how the resister sees the oppressor and the oppressor’s world, but how the resister sees her own world.3
But even those who acknowledge the oppressed as the oppressed and as unfairly deprived of justice, equality, and respect aren’t thereby “traveling” to the worlds of the oppressed. Even those who recognize oppression as a problem and do not boast of it as an achievement may mistakenly think that the solution to that problem is to guarantee justice, equality, and respect. But that is an answer to oppression that is offered in the “logic of oppression.” To be seen as unfairly deprived of a certain standing that others enjoy—despite being entitled to that standing in virtue of sharing with them attributes such as reason or personhood—is not the same as being seen as having traits and capacities that allow one to recognize and resist the insidious forces of oppression and the oppressors who keep those forces fueled. Recognition of people simply as deprived of that to which they are entitled doesn’t invite recognition of them as beings who are capable, for example, of seeing straight into and mocking the delusion and self-deception adoringly embraced by oppressors in order for the latter to hide their desperate need of and dependence on the very people they lord over. Portraying the oppressed as satisfied by coming at last to enjoy justice, equality, and respect is at odds with entertaining the possibility that the fondest dream of the oppressed may in fact not be that they come to be seen as enough like those who oppress them that they are guaranteed a certain shared formal set of rights. There is no reason to be thrilled if the best the oppressors have to offer is a version of something along these lines: “We’ve changed our minds. First we thought you were rather radically different from us and we wanted to mark such difference by depriving you of what we know ourselves to be entitled to. But now we’ve come to our senses: we no longer will exclude you or deny you the rights we have. After all, basically you are just like us. So come join us, won’t you?”
Lugones doesn’t wish to cease using “oppression,” “oppressors,” and “the oppressed”; they remain a means of bringing attention to the violent relationships resistance to which she is theorizing. But she does not want the conceptual armory therewith deployed to be seen as the only or the best device for undoing that violence and for understanding and giving voice to those subject to it.
I hope to highlight pervasive aspects of Lugones’s work in which she employs concepts that capture the texture of oppression but that do not at the same time lend strength to the logic of oppression. Recall her worry: if to be oppressed is simply and only not to enjoy justice, equality, and respect, then to cease to be oppressed is to enjoy them; but this is very thin conceptual and procedural gruel, too much in service to the systems it promises to undo. The fact that oppression does include the denial of justice, equality, and respect doesn’t mean that satisfying the demands of justice, equality, and respect carries no seeds of treachery, that it takes care of the problem rather than leaving behind fertile ground for the sprouting and spread of myriad forms of mistreatment.
But what can open up or reveal possibilities shoved out of sight by the star status of “oppression”? I suggest looking at a more colloquial expression than “oppression” or “domination” or “exploitation,” one often used by people subject to mistreatment by others in order to capture their experiences of being the object of various forms of aggression and violence: they talk about being “treated like trash.” Indeed “trash” and close siblings such as “waste” and “disposable” occur quite commonly in descriptions of abuse. Often such terms are incorporated into titles of books or articles. Recent examples include Ha Jin, War Trash (2004); Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts (2004); Grace Chang, Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy (2000); Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (2004); and Dorothy Allison, Trash (2002).4 An Amnesty International blog entry by Fotis Philippous on October 18, 2010, sports the headline “Roma Community in Romania Still Treated Like Waste Six Years On.” A blog from July 8, 2009, on the New Zealand organization E2NZ quotes member of Parliament Jim Anderton describing migrants being “treated like waste products.”
Though the semantic home of trash seems to be in reference to things, focusing on its broader use in reference to people may illuminate important features of common forms of mistreating others—features that more formally developed concepts such as oppression only dimly reveal or in fact occlude. Even more, in light of Lugones’s efforts to bring attention to “the oppressed” as “subjects, lively beings, resisters,” a notable feature of trash comes to the fore: because of what trash is and how it is created, it can talk back. It does talk back. It resists our attempts to banish it. Perhaps, then—paradoxical as it may at first seem—the description of people as being treated like trash allows or invites us to notice avenues of resistance and refusal.
We focus first on how a thing becomes trash, leaving for the next section an exploration of how trash can talk back.5 We shall then return to the question of what it means for people to be treated like trash and the exploration of this mode of mistreatment, and resistance to it, in Lugones’s work.
Something becomes trash only in virtue of our making it so, through our actions or our words. We toss it out, throw it away, or deign it to be tossable, throw-awayable. However much or little we valued it or used it, we now declare its worthlessness or uselessness (at least for our purposes; we may easily forget that others may find it not at all worthless or useless). We dispose of it. Rendering it no longer in the orbit of our care or concern, we separate ourselves from it, abandon it, disown it, leave it unattended or in any event to be dealt with by others. Our reasons for doing this, and our own feelings and attitudes about doing so, are many and various. Just because we throw something out doesn’t necessarily mean we are glad to do so. We might or might not have a sense of loss, or a sense of relief (or both). We might or might not have considered it as something contaminating or polluting. We may have tossed it out accidentally. Or regret having done so on purpose.6
Just because we have managed to get something to disappear from our immediate view or concern doesn’t mean it has disappeared entirely.
1.Even if we live in neighborhoods where household trash is regularly scooped up and taken away by sanitation workers, we might be aware of the fact that figuring out what to do with all that stuff is at the heart of political battles over the siting of landfills, transfer stations, incinerators, ship containers, and other destinations for our detritus.7 Indeed it would never occur to anyone to declare “Not In My Backyard”—let alone employ all the political muscle one can marshal to make sure the stuff ends up in the backyards of those with little political pull—if one really thought that for trash to disappear from one’s sight is for it to have thoroughly vanished.
2.Catching up on headlines of the gossip glossies while standing in the grocery checkout line, we might be aware of the fact that one of the favorite research tools of tattletale columnists is rifling through the trash bins outside the homes of the objects of their insistent inquiry. A.J. Weberman gained borrowed fame by appointing himself chief investigator of Bob Dylan’s garbage—all in the hope of getting the real dirt on Dylan, revealing him to be not at all the hero his fans adored.8 And in fact combing through trash is a widespread practice. What it can and cannot reveal, should and should not be allowed to reveal, are topics of considerable concern to legal professionals and social scientists. State and federal courts, up to and including the Supreme Court of the United States, have been called on to decide whether or not a person’s trash can be seized and pawed through by government agents without a warrant (California v. Greenwood). Garbology—the word was blessed for inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1989—is recognized as a subfield within archaeology. One of its foremost practitioners, whose work is cited in the OED entry, is William Rathje. For decades he and teams of his graduate students at the University of Arizona engaged in social science–sanctified snooping. Their research led Rathje to the conclusion that “… what people have owned—and thrown away—can speak more eloquently, informatively, and truthfully about the lives they lead than they themselves ever may” (Rathje and Murphy 2001, 54).9
3.Perhaps we are or have met dumpster divers, freegans, or others searching for food in household, supermarket, or restaurant waste receptacles—just a small sample of the many activities that vividly illustrate the familiar saw that one person’s trash is another person’s treasure.10 Visitors to art museums or galleries are no longer surprised to learn about the use artists make of the refuse scattered across both urban and rural landscapes or beached unceremoniously at the edge of the sea.11
In short, as confident as some of us may be that what we have consigned to the garbage heap or trash bin is safely out of sight and en route to the landfill or “wherever that stuff goes,” it perhaps has grown harder and harder to ignore the fact that though our trash is no longer here it very likely is somewhere else. (Our worries about material we think we have expunged by putting it in the computer trash bin are not irrelevant in this connection.) Trash talks back: it frustrates attempts to thoroughly dismiss it, shove it out of sight, silence it, send it as if by centrifugal force out of contact with us. On the one hand it may cause problems, especially for those left to deal with the toxic menace it may contain, or for those whose histories it reveals. On the other hand it may provide rich resources for those capable of and interested in divining the treasures within.
So far, then, we’ve explored some of the features of trash—in particular how something becomes trash, and ways in which trash in a sense talks back, refuses to bury once and for all activities or histories the very vanishing of which it might be thought to achieve. I’ve suggested that thinking about these features of trash might illuminate and be illuminated by Lugones’s work, especially if we focus on people being treated like trash: in light of her concern about the narrowness of the concept of oppression, might it help to consider ways in which oppression, or aspects of it, involve being treated like trash? And given the vagueness of the concept of “being treated like trash,” might Lugones’s close attention to the experiences of oppressed persons—persons also in resistance to such violence—help give a bit more definition to the notion of being treated like trash?
Certainly the concepts of purity and impurity that Lugones deploys in her descriptions of the forms of mistreatment visited upon the oppressed suggest a possible link to trash. But as we shall see, a great deal else in her working vocabulary also points in that direction.
Erasure. “Erase” and “erasure” appear with some frequency in Lugones’s descriptions of the experience of the oppressed. “All oppressive control is violent because it attempts to erase selves that we are that are dangerous to the maintenance of domination over us” (SAS 59). This use of erase suggests not an attempt to eradicate the oppressed but a way of trying to mute or obscure or disregard aspects of their lives that oppressors find unwelcome because threatening to the dominating position they do not wish to give up. Of course if there weren’t anyone to dominate, that position would be lost. As the proverbial expression would have it, the oppressors don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater: that is, they want to hold on to what is to their advantage while nonetheless getting rid of what undermines it. They don’t want to throw out the baby—oppressed persons that are the embodied site of their domination—with the bathwater of the baby’s “dangerous” recalcitrance.12
This sense of erasure occurs elsewhere as well. Commenting on the impersonality of cultural imperialism, Lugones points out that “there is no person-to-person mistreatment to make it clear that one is about to be erased from the discourse by being asked to speak in or listen to a universal voice” (LPF 70). In such a case, the cultural imperialist has appropriated another’s voice, folded it into, for example, the “woman’s voice,” but in the same breath has disposed of that voice, though not of the person whose voice it is. To some cultural imperialists, such voices are “nonsensical” (PIS 140)—spouters of semantic and conceptual rubbish. The white/Angla feminist theorist cut in the cultural imperialist mode conceives of her theory-making in a way that requires both reference to women different from herself and erasure of the significance of such difference. Here again, there appears to be a worry about not wanting to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In this case the baby is the necessary acknowledgment of differences among women; the bathwater is what exploration of the significance of such differences would reveal.
The concept of erasure also appears in Lugones’s explanation of the difference between the loving playfulness she takes to be central to “traveling” to another’s world and what she describes as the “agonistic traveling” celebrated in the works of Johan Huizinga and Hans-Georg Gadamer. The playful attitude characteristic of the agonistic traveler, she argues, is not at all a loving one. It is that of someone primed for “conquest, domination, reduction of what they meet to their own sense of order, and erasure of the other ‘world’ ” (WT 95). The agonistic conqueror does not exterminate those he comes in contact with but folds them into his expanding kingdom. However, he has no love, no tenderness for them, and in fact a vested interest in the “erasure of [their] resistant subjectivities” (ED 192). He is in search of subjects whose subjectivity he will disregard.
Still other forms of erasure are articulated in Lugones’s discussion of playfulness and world-traveling: “I am interested here in those many cases in which white/Angla women do one or more of the following to women of color: they ignore us, ostracize us, render us invisible, stereotype us, leave us completely alone, interpret us as crazy. All of this while we are in their midst” (WT 83).
Here again it is notable that the women of color referred to have not been tossed out bodily, have not literally disappeared, have not been killed. They exist, and in this case exist in the company of white/Angla women. But they are not paid attention to; they are kept at the margins, rendered invisible or unintelligible, abandoned. (Lugones isn’t saying that such attitudes or actions all appear simultaneously. Some cannot take place at the same time: for example, you can’t both thoroughly ignore a person and interpret her as crazy, though interpreting her as crazy involves ignoring certain things about her, or her craziness might be offered as a reason for ignoring her.) The women of color remain present, but they’ve been rendered worthless or in any event unwelcome as participants in whatever is going on. They’ve been tossed out in thought if not in deed, banished from the circle of care and attention.
Purity. The various kinds of erasure that Lugones describes appear to reflect oppressors’ doubts about the wisdom of actually “rubbing out” the oppressed, eradicating them: the baby is just too valuable to eliminate entirely. But at the same time, the oppressors seem to be anxious about contact with the cultural bathwater with which the very being of the baby is saturated: hence the widespread use by oppressors of the multiple devices by which humans explicitly or implicitly declare the worthlessness and disposability of the thoughts, speech, and cultural life-worlds of others. Such a picture is strongly suggested by Lugones’s exploration of the oppressors’ need to establish and maintain a purifying order.13 The order in question is a hierarchical ranking among groups of people, and it is an order established not by the expunging or eradication of the subordinated (which is not to deny that human history is chockfull of attempts to establish such an order) but through structures that differentiate between the purity of the dominating and the impurity of the subordinated.
In her discussions of purity, impurity, and separation, Lugones implies that among the privileges oppressors award themselves is the capacity to know what is and is not trash, the authority to determine what can and cannot be, is and is not to be, disposed of. Only they can tell what’s the baby and what’s the bathwater; only they can be trusted to keep them separate. The power of the disposers, the trashmakers, lies not only in erasing, tossing out or banishing untoward aspects of the dominated, but also in consigning to the wastebasket aspects of themselves they hope to get rid of.
This capacity to know, and know how to act upon, the distinction between what is worth having or keeping and what is not belongs to the dominators in virtue of their having an uncompromised form of rationality—reason that can be exercised objectively and impartially precisely because those possessing it lie “outside history, outside culture” (PIS 130). On such a view, culture is an encumbrance, a sure carrier of impurity, including though not limited to an adulterated capacity to reason. Quoting Renato Rosaldo, Lugones alludes to the work the notion of “culture” is made to do in marking distinctions between the precious and the worthless, the valuable and the useless: “Full citizens lack culture, and those most culturally endowed lack full citizenship” (125; cf. Rosaldo 1989, 198). The distinction at work here is not between better and worse cultures, between pure and impure cultures, but between the “postcultural” (those who somehow have shed cultural identity altogether) and those still laboring under the restricting weight of cultural baggage—all that impure stuff of human life that centers on human senses, passions, embodied habits and rituals, the contaminating scum from which the postcultural pure reasoner has achieved cleansing.
But how did the “impartial reasoner” peel off the “symbolic and institutionalized inscriptions” that are sure markers of cultural membership (PIS 130)? By arrogating the authority to tell who can and who cannot get rid of one’s culture and then declaring oneself “outside of culture” (HCS 46). I can toss aside my culture, disown it, but you can’t: after all, “racialization and the having of a culture are what happens to others” (49).
So far, then, I’ve been reviewing Lugones’s work with an eye out for ways in which the idea of being treated like trash does justice to and enhances her description of the mistreatment of the oppressed and of their resistance to it. In the kinds of cases Lugones brings to our attention, oppressors do not wish to get rid of the oppressed entirely, but they do want to mute or obscure or remove from attention features of the oppressed they deem threatening to their domination. They want to keep the baby but throw out the bathwater, and they assume that they can tell the difference. They presume to know what is useful and what is useless about the subordinated, what is valuable and what is worthless. They fancy themselves to be tidy householders, excellent judges of the difference between the pure and the impure, the wheat and the chaff, the keepable and the disposable.
But like run-of-the-mill trash creators, they fail to notice some significant characteristics of trash—in particular its capacity to reveal unflattering facts about its creators and yet also to harbor rich possibilities for its own continued existence and livelihood. Treating something or someone as trash, attempting to get it out of sight, out of mind, can tell us a lot about those who have tossed it out, and about the assumptions they are likely to make, indeed need to make, about those they have treated that way.
1.For example, those who treat others as trash may well make the mistake of assuming that if you treat human beings like trash you turn such people into things—entities of a sort that don’t have lives, don’t speak, don’t fight back. But as we were reminded above, even nonhuman trash talks. Indeed curious gossip columnists, narcotics agents, and meticulous archaeologists can make it squeal. Just as people’s histories do not stop with but live on in what they toss out, the fears and anxieties and self-deceptions of the oppressors show up in their apparently nonchalant but in fact studied efforts to hide their need to both depend on and erase the oppressed, the very ones they must render as lacking “agency, autonomy, self-regulating ability” (PIS 130). This becomes particularly clear in Lugones’s discussion of the “lover of purity” posing both as someone in whom pristine reason is ever so neatly separated from the contamination of the “confused, worthless remainder—passion, sensuality” (129), and as someone “outside history, outside culture” (130). But however much the pure reasoner wants to slough off markers of impurity, his very treatment of those who he insists are imbued with such flotsam reveals his inability to rid himself of his own contamination. It exposes his failure to ensure “that his remainder become of no consequence to his own sense of himself” as exquisitely and uniquely qualified to control the messy world around him (130). “Thus his needs must be taken care of by others hidden in spaces relegated outside of public view, where he parades himself as pure” (130). His needs don’t disappear just because he thinks of them as defiling dross. But he does what he can to hide from himself the fact of their lingering presence. He arranges for the hopelessly impure to keep his own impurity out of sight, out of mind. Similarly, his declaring himself “outside of culture is self-deceiving” (HCS 46)—he may think, or wish, that he’s gotten rid of that pesky pollutant, but it is still right there in the hallway or on the back porch. He just chooses not to notice it. Trash talks back, undermines efforts to make it go away.
2.Those who treat others as trash may be brought up short, even shocked, to be reminded that their judgment about what is to be valued and what is worthless about things and people, what constitutes the appropriate use of them and what does not, is not dispositive. No doubt they are aware of the old saw that one person’s trash is another person’s treasure, but they seem to have ignored that fact in this case. Indeed, they have tried to ensure that anyone who thought there might be treasure will be ignored, her voice silenced, her capacity to find treasure erased. In this connection, Lugones’s exploration of curdling is particularly pertinent:
3.In one of the most vivid and enduring of the many rich images Lugones develops to explain a phenomenon she wants to bring to our attention, she describes what happens when mayonnaise curdles. Mayonnaise, she points out, is an oil-in-water emulsion. In the process of making it, an impatient stirrer may cause it to curdle: instead of being smoothly blended together, “the ingredients [yolk, water and oil] become separated from each other.” More accurately, they tend to “coalesce toward oil or toward water,” albeit in different degrees. One ends up with variable portions of “yolky oil and oily yolk” (PIS 122).
Lugones brings attention to the difference between the blending effort of making mayonnaise and the detaching effort of separating yolk from white. In the latter case, one’s efforts also can go awry, but on account of producing an unwanted blending (of yolk and white) rather than on account of not effecting a desired one (of yolk, oil, and water).
Lugones wants to focus on a form of separation that is tied not to purity but to impurity. The “splitting” separation of yolk from white is part of an “exercise in purity,” whereas the “curdling” separation of yolky oil and oily yolk constitutes an “exercise in impurity” (123). Such impurity provides for Lugones a “connection between impurity and resistance” (122) and, in this connection, an image for mestizaje “as a central name for impure resistance to interlocked, intermeshed oppressions” (122).
It’s crucial for Lugones that embracing the impurity of curdling separation is not the same as affirming the impurity of splitting separation: the latter is “in allegiance to” whereas the former is “in defiance of” the “domination intention” of the exercise of separation (122). The position of the “impure” vis-à-vis their dominators is to be understood not as an eagerness to share the dominators’ understanding of and rejection of impurity and thereby to provide evidence of the dominated’s own claims to purity, but to emphasize their own impurity understood in terms not set by dominators: “Mestizaje defies control through simultaneously asserting the impure, curdled multiple state and rejecting fragmentation into pure parts [that is, purely pure and purely impure]. In this play of assertion and rejection, the mestiza is unclassifiable, unmanageable. She has no pure parts to be ‘had,’ controlled” (123).
Lugones might be seen as in effect arguing that the not-quite-thoroughly impure condition of “the oppressed”—not so impure as to be totally banished or eliminated, but impure enough to be considered as trash and thus appropriately kept out of the orbit of concern—is in fact a condition in which great treasure is to be found, treasure unimaginable to those confident of their right to declare what is trash and what is treasure. It is in such impurity—albeit understood in a sense beyond the ken of the dominators—that the strength of the multiply oppressed as resisters, as lively subjects, can be found.
Lugones’s emphasis on embracing the impurity of curdling is a kind of finding treasure in what others have regarded as trash. The embrace of curdledness is part and parcel of the resisters’ mocking the pathetic need of the dominators to establish their purity: of course the dominators aren’t pure and it bothers them, so they rely on the “impurity” of those they dominate to try to sustain the illusion. Not only do the dominated see through what the dominators are doing—indeed see the trash in the dominators’ alleged treasure of purity—but they see treasure in the trash the dominators allege them to be.
What have we learned from exploring “being treated like trash” (and close variations thereof) as a means of talking about oppression that avoids strengthening forces of oppression and fortifies resistance to it? And does such an exercise at the same time help trim away any unhelpful vagueness in that widely used phrase?
Thinking about how something or someone comes to be called or treated like trash is quite instructive. The deeming of something or someone as trash tells us nothing about the inherent value of that thing or that person. It does, however, tell us something about what the trash-proclaimer reckons to be worth or not worth having or keeping in her orbit. Though it is true that one might only reluctantly part with an object, might unhappily feel obliged to toss it in the trash, it doesn’t seem likely that one will treat a person like trash and have a sense of loss or be pained in doing so. In any event, though the very existence of trash doesn’t tell a single or simple story about how something came to be so regarded, it does point to the fact of there being some kind of story about the beliefs and values and judgments of the one who anointed the thing or the person as trash.
Resistance to oppression of the sort Lugones appears to have in mind involves both weakening the oppressors and strengthening the resisters. Focusing on people being treated like trash can work on both fronts: it both aids attempts to reveal features trashmakers may wish to deny about themselves, and supports efforts to highlight features the “trashed” may wish to animate and reveal about themselves. Following Lugones’s lead, and suggesting a few additions to her conceptual repertoire, we come to see oppressors/trashmakers as both confident about their ability to distinguish the pure from the impure, the passion-free postcultural from the swinishly enculturated, and at the same time so anxious about just where they themselves belong that they desperately need those they deem contaminated to sustain the illusion of their own purity. Considering the common idea that one person’s trash is another person’s treasure, we are invited to observe ways in which the oppressed/“trashed” harbor in themselves the treasure the oppressors/trashmakers cannot or will not see. The dominated are indeed impure, Lugones argues, but not in the sense of “impure” so beloved and belabored by the oppressors/trashmakers. The “trashed” not only can come to see the treasure ready at hand in their worlds—they also can smell the stench wafting through the oppressors’ proud proclamations of purity.
Two large questions lie behind this chapter: one, just reviewed, is what might be learned by describing the mistreatment of the multiply oppressed and their resistance to it in terms of their being treated like trash, keeping in mind Lugones’s desideratum that any such account serve the logic of resistance and not the logic of oppression. The second, to which we now return, is whether along the way we have made any ground in becoming clearer about the meaning of “being treated like trash.” Of course it is not necessarily the case that carving out a definition is desirable, that we’d be better off uncovering or stipulating conditions for the proper use of the expression. Perhaps its attractiveness and ready availability depend on the looseness of criteria for its employment, its evident lack of inclusion in the lexicons of political and moral philosophy. Given the apparent rhetorical value of the phrase “being treated like trash” and close relatives such as being treated as if one were “waste” or being “disposable,” its political potency might well be reduced by attempts to limit its range. In this connection it is pertinent to point out that in parsing Lugones’s account of the particular kinds of abuse to which she brings our attention it seemed necessary to highlight that if such abuse is indeed a way of treating people like trash, then we must think of such treatment as not being the same as exterminating people. And yet there is no rule, implicit or explicit, excluding the use of the phrase in the context of such extermination. Still, the occasion Lugones’s work provides to think about what it means to be treated like trash does invite us to consider the difference between efforts to throw out the bathwater but not the baby, and those aimed at getting rid of the baby altogether. It also alerts us to the insidious preparatory work that throwing out the bathwater nevertheless can do for projects of ultimately throwing out the baby.14
1.IP 13.
2.I understand Lugones to be using “the logic of oppression” and “the logic of resistance” to refer to what more broadly might be called “the logic of the situation.” What she seems to have in mind are fairly predictable sets of beliefs and actions that characterize conditions of oppression and those that characterize conditions of resistance. For example, oppressors are not prevented by what we think of as “logical thinking” from imagining those they oppress as being “lively subjects,” but “the logic of the situation” in which they are oppressors militates against their entertaining that possibility.
3.I have found it useful and I hope not at odds with the kind of work she wants her notion of “world” to do to think of such worlds as something like theaters in which a certain range of performances are made possible for characters constructed in particular ways. Their vocabularies, activities, attitudes, relations, efforts, and achievements are intelligible to those who are familiar with the theater and the performers, but not to those who are not and who either don’t know or don’t care about learning how to understand what is going on. It is to be fully expected that actors are constructed in quite different ways and with quite different consequences in different theaters. One important limitation to this reading is that Lugones explicitly says that moving from one world to another “is not a matter of acting. One does not pose as someone else; one does not pretend to be, for example, someone of a different personality or character or someone who uses space or language differently from the other person” (WT 89–90). But the fact that she goes out of her way to distinguish world-travel from moving from one performance into another does suggest that reference to some degree of similarity may be helpful, especially in light of her use of the notion of inhabitants of worlds being “constructed” in particular ways and “animating” such constructions, sometimes knowingly, sometimes not (WT 88–89).
4.See also Allison (1993), and Wray and Newitz (1997). When used derogatorily, “white trash” alludes to those considered marginal members of and a disgrace to the “white race.”
5.It is worth noting that trash, waste, garbage, junk, rubbish, and their close semantic siblings are not as interchangeable as they may in some contexts seem to be. Though distinctions among the terms are not hard and fast, different ones are employed to mark what are considered important differences. Instructions from sanitation departments provide familiar examples: though regulations vary over time and place, householders and business owners may be expected to know and to honor the distinctions among various kinds of matter left out for removal by the appointed parties. A charming example from the city of St. Paul in 1912 insists that while a license is required to “remove, transport or carry dust, ashes, manure, grease, offal, rubbish or waste matter,” such restrictions do not apply to “the removal of garbage or night soil” (“St. Paul, Minn.: Refuse and Waste Matter. Disposal Of” 1912, 200). It is not uncommon to distinguish between the “junk” in the attic and the “trash” in the can in the kitchen, or for that matter to wonder whether the junk ought to go in the trash. Again, on the whole, there don’t seem to be rigid rules about which term is to be used for which kind of substance, but it is clear that we often do want some way to mark distinctions we think are of some significance.
6.Much of the broad framework I employ here for the discussion of trash is developed at length in my book Trash Talks: Revelations in the Rubbish (Spelman 2016).
7.See for example Pellow (2002).
8.Robert Mayer, “Dylan’s Boswell,” St. Petersburg Times, April 26, 1971, news.google.com/newspapers?nid=888&dat=19710426&id=CD9SAAAAIBAJ&sjid= tnUDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6848,5781519.
9.This particular conclusion of Rathje’s is overdrawn but not without great interest.
10.For a rich account of the remarkable culinary treasures to be found in dumpsters, see Stuart (2009), especially chapter 1.
11.On use of garbage and trash by artists, see for example Scanlan (2005), especially chapter 3.
12.Readers unfamiliar with the phrase “throwing out the baby with the bathwater” may find it not apt here, but in its widespread, ordinary use there is no suggestion that what is referred to as “the baby” is being conceptually or politically infantilized.
13.Citing Mary Douglas’s views about the function of the containment of “dirt” and related pollutants in efforts to create and sustain order, Lugones remarks on what she sees as Douglas’s lack of attention to the difference between “oppressive and non-oppressive structuring” (PIS 132; cf. Douglas 1989).
14.Many thanks to Monique Roelofs for helpful discussions as I was developing the analysis in this chapter.
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———. 1993. Bastard Out of Carolina. New York: Plume.
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