Description
Book SynopsisAddressing plastics can feel overwhelming. Guilt, shame, anger, hurt, fear, dismissiveness, and despair abound. Beyond Straw Men moves beyond hot take or straw man fallacies by illustrating how affective counterpublics mobilized around plastics reveal broader stories about environmental justice and social change. Inspired by on- and offline organizing in the Global South and the Global South of the North, Phaedra C. Pezzullo engages public controversies and policies through analysis of hashtag activism, campaign materials, and podcast interviews with headline-making advocates in Bangladesh, Kenya, the United States, and Vietnam. She argues that plastics have become an articulator of crisis and an entry point into the contested environmental politics of carbon-heavy masculinity, carceral policies, planetary fatalism, eco-ableism, greenwashing, marine life endangerment, pollution colonialism, and waste imperialism. Attuned to plastic attachments, Beyond Straw Men illustrates how everyday
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: Care amid Oceans of Trouble
1. #ThereIsNoAway: Carbon-Heavy Masculinity and the Life/Death Cycle of Plastics
2. Have a Coke and a #FootprintCalculator: The Myth of Recycling and Transnational
Greenwashing
3. From #BanPlasticsKE to #ISupportBanPlasticsKE: Pissed Off Online, Picturing Participation,
and Policing Pollution in Kenya
4. Engaging #StrawlessInSeattle and #StopSucking: The Loneliest Whale, Sporting Fun, and
American Exceptionalism
5. #SuckItAbleism Intervenes: Eco-normative Shaming, Voicing Justice, and Planetary Fatalism
6. Creating #ToiChonCa (#IChooseFish): Trauma, Affective Art, and Big Tech Dominance
Conclusion: #BreakFree(FromPlastics)
Notes
Bibliography
Index
