Encouraged by state requirements for prepackaging, Black and Latinx producers and distributors of legal cannabis in California have developed novel, symbolically and socially significant forms of marketing. Black and Latinx cannabis industries have developed their own “commodity aesthetics,” using product packaging, live events, and social media to entice buyers with a combination of beautiful sights, smells, textures, signs, and symbols that represent the contradictions of working-class Black and Latinx life in contemporary California. Black and Latinx cannabis popular cultures combine images of freedom and transcendence with depictions of the low wage jobs that many Black and Latinx people work. This is because, rather than an impediment to work, cannabis consumption is a kind of support for or accessory to labor. Many consumers use cannabis to dull the tedium and pain of labor and to sustain them throughout the workday. This essay provides a critical overview of Black and Latinx cannabis marketing in California, and its targeting of working-class consumers of color. While I discuss several examples, my central case study is the successful Black and Latinx cannabis distributor Teds Budz. I draw on interviews, ethnographies of live cannabis events, and visual studies of cannabis packages and social media, arguing that seemingly “escapist” qualities in cannabis culture critically foreground the material limits of the world from which Black and Latinx workers are trying to escape. Cannabis commodity aesthetics, I conclude, promise people of color an exit from the drudgery of work that can also tighten their ties to low wage jobs.
Keyword: California
Wasted: Wastewater, Hygiene Theatrics, and Contaminated Imaginaries
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.