Articles by Sage Gerson

Sage Gerson is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she has also completed an Interdepartmental PhD Emphasis in Environment and Society. Sage received a 2021–2022 ACLS-Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship for her dissertation, The Leaky Grid: Black and Native Electrified Imaginaries. In Fall 2022, she will be joining RISD’s Literary Arts and Studies Department as an assistant professor.

Wasted: Wastewater, Hygiene Theatrics, and Contaminated Imaginaries

El Estero Wastewater Treatment Facility. Santa Barbara, California. Photo courtesy of the City of Santa Barbara.
By Jeremy Chow and Sage Gerson

This collaborative essay takes up three pungent streams of wastewater to address how environments, politics, communities, and power are mediated by liquid waste: urine, feces, and everything else recklessly flushed down toilets, washed down drains, stored in pits, and dumped in the ocean. “Wasted” looks to the multi-scalar worlds of wastewater by centering waste sites and COVID-19 concerns regarding wastewater virality. First, our tour of Santa Barbara’s El Estero Water Resource Center brings us to the variegated, embodied, multi-sensory, and multispecies communities of wastewater. El Estero provides an odoriferous infrastructural current through which we follow wastewater and the socialites and environments it mediates on California’s Central Coast. We then move to the ways wastewater has been interwoven with global pandemic fears to address how human waste retains infectious COVID-19 viral material even after it has been flushed away. COVID-19, in other words, haunts the infrastructural ports through which wastewater is funneled. We conclude with wastewater’s epochal effects within the Anthropocene. Throughout, we offer the term “hygiene theatrics” to identify how the performance of hygiene, cleanliness, and purity rely on dichotomous constructions of dirtiness and cleanliness that reinforce structural power dynamics including racism and homophobia. “Wasted” is a collaborative feminist and queer experiment in form and methodology that explores wastewater as both a material reality and a theoretical apparatus that is informed by and contributes to the environmental humanities, infrastructure studies, and feminist and queer science studies.