Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.

Program

Women's and Gender Studies

Advisor

Saadia Toor

Subject Categories

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies

Keywords

AIDS, Diseased Pariah News, Stephen Varble, New York City, San Francisco Bay Area, trash art, zines, queer ecology

Abstract

Metaphors of waste are particularly potent when enlisted to describe and justify the segregation and subjugation of marginalized communities. For, as discard studies scholars have shown, waste is not merely about trash; it is about power (Liboiron and Lepawsky). Maintaining power necessitates hierarchical categorization, whereby the needs and desires of some people are prioritized over those of others, to frequently catastrophic effect.

At the turn of the 21st century, AIDS patients and allies needed no such explanation of what it meant to be relegated to the fringes and designated as waste. Thrown to the proverbial curb of society, PWAs (people with AIDS) were considered as good as garbage. And yet – many fought back, not by attempting to redeem the category of trash, but rather, by reclaiming it. Exemplified by the trashy, obscene rhetoric of Diseased Pariah News (DPN), and the literal trash art of Stephen Varble, these vanguards subverted their “wasteful and/or wasted” (Sikora 378) status by embracing trash as a weapon of dissent. It is here, then, that I locate what Christopher Schmidt calls “the “mysterious charisma of waste” (xii) – the liminal space where something gross just might become something glorious; where the rejected stuff of society is suddenly imbued with political force. Through these two case studies of DPN and Stephen Varble, this thesis will thus seek to elaborate on the power of waste work, explore its significance in the broader landscape of the AIDS epidemic, and, finally, consider its heretofore unacknowledged relevance to the future of queer ecology.

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