UC Davis

Solid pollution in the ocean, or marine debris, is not accumulating in one island in the middle of the North Pacific Ocean; rather, it is distributed throughout the world's oceans from surface to seafloor. The vast majority of this pollution is comprised of plastics, which both leach and attract other contaminants (plasticizers, flame retardants, colorants, and pesticides, for instance), and the vast majority of these are too small to see with the naked eye. Marine debris is a product of capitalism and a form of patriarchal violence. Toxicants leached by ubiquitous plastics disproportionately affect bodies sexed female at birth by acting as endocrine disruptors. The labor of maintaining life that materialist feminists call social reproduction of managing how much—rather, how little—plastic winds up in a household often falls on women in households. And this prevalence of plastics is the result of an economic system rooted in patriarchal values that was able to rise to hegemony via European colonialism. “Death to Disposability: Marine Debris as Violence” examines these political-economic violences of marine debris as a form of patriarchal violence though linguistic conceptualizations that characterize practices of enclosure and extraction in marine contexts. It does so by studying three flows of oil, water, and capital in the three water bodies of the open North Pacific Ocean, the Santa Barbara Channel, and the Skagerrak Strait. This project consists of three case studies—“Death to Disposability in the North Pacific Gyre” on the nonprofit The Ocean Cleanup, “Ecotoxicology: The Santa Barbara Channel, the California Current, and Invisible Violences” on formerly oil-producing Platform Holly, and “Still Holding: Picking up Pieces of Capitalist Expediency on the West Coast of Sweden” on the petrochemical company Borealis—and a book of poetry, Hold Fast. This project employs both qualitative and artistic research methods, namely discourse analysis, close reading, and poetry as research practice.