#toxicworlds

“The body can be reclaimed and refigured as home—that desired place of connectedness, family, and well-being—with full realization that the body/home is sometimes the site of exposure to just the opposite: abuse, hunger, polluted water and air” (Di Chiro 2010, 200).

Image: LaToya Ruby Frazier, Home Body Series: Wrapped In Gramps’ Blanket, In GrandmaRuby’s Velour Bottoms, In Gramps’ Pajamas, Covered In Gramps’ Blanket, 2010.

“Yet, if all plastics were recycled, all plastic food containers were eliminated, and all demonstrably harmful chemicals were banned, bodies would still not be free of plastic pollution.” — Liboiron, Plasticizers 134

The threat of pollution as played out in the 1995 film safe (especially the tagline “in the 21st century nobody will be … SAFE”) reminded us of the constant impact of plastics today.

CA & IMR

Image source: https://www.pastposters.com/details.php?prodId=16568

Ana Mendieta, Silueta Works in Mexico, 1973–77/1991. 

“An immense land lies about us. Nations migrate within us. The past looms close, as immediate as breath, blood, and scars on a wrist...To re-member is to discover patterns in fragments. As an Earth historian, I once sought the relics of deep time. To be an honest woman, I must trace other residues of hardness.” 

-Trace, Lauret Savoy, 29-30

I was reminded of this song when reading Mel Chen. 

“Then there's "Daybed", which feels reflective, accepting and calm. “When I wrote it,” Twigs says, “I knew that the whole of my life was about to fall apart. Everything that I knew, all my stability and everything I was attached to… everything was about to fucking go.” A pretty horrific moment, then? “But it’s not an angry song. It’s like, wow, this is life. It’s gonna happen. I’m gonna lose everything and have to build it back up again.” The lyric ‘possessive is my daybed’, she says, is about when you’re lying on your sofa lost in thought, and you just can’t move. “Have you ever had that?” she asks. “Everything in the room becomes really abstract. Like when you say a word over and over again and it starts to lose its meaning. Like that, but with your room or your house or just… everything. You just start to see things in a different order. Everything has a place and a harmony and all you can do is let it happen, let it wash over you.”For someone who is usually very on top of things, very deliberate, it must be a huge deal to feel out of control like that? “Yes and no… I think there is a control in the acceptance that you’re not in control. As soon as you can accept that, all of a sudden you’re not struggling anymore and you feel at peace. You feel calm.” Her eventual recovery shines through here; the light at the end of the tunnel.” - https://i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/zmjny4/fka-twigs-interview-magdalene-new-album 

“In this sense, a material memoir may be a form of ‘counter memory,’ as described by Ladelle McWhorter, drawing on Foucault: counter-memory is ‘an important ethical practice--first of all because it helps us escape from the cage of official truth and start thinking again and second because it is the stuff of alternative matrices of knowledge and power, because it can function as the building material of alternate systems of meaning (199)” (95).

Quote source: Alaimo, Stacy. “Material Memoirs: Science, Autobiography, and the Substantial Self” and “Deviant Agents” in Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indiana University Press, 2010.

Image quote source: Reviewed Work: Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. by Michel Foucault, Donald F. BouchardReview by: Dalia Judovitz