UC Irvine

This dissertation examines plastic waste incorporated in performance as a means to exhibit the agential power of waste in its entanglement with the human body with the aim of questioning the ethics embedded in consumerist, market-driven sustainability culture. Through the analysis of an array of contemporary performances and installations, I argue that by radically demonstrating the agency of waste, these work complicate common attitudes around waste management, recycling and sustainability and trouble ethical approaches embedded in modern urban living. I argue that plastic waste on stage in motion with the actor(s) transcend the role of a passive prop or stage object and theorize that plastic waste as an active agent becomes capable of self-organization, influencing human life affectively and existentially. Assuming a new materialist and posthuman lens and in direct conversation with Jane Bennet’s theory of vibrancy, I use the redefinition of agency as relational to problematize the human/nonhuman and animate/inanimate binaries. I argue that in performances that use plastic waste in radically innovative ways, plastic transcends into materialities that assert agency and directs the narrative and action on stage, not manipulated by the actor(s) but agential forces that animate the performance on their own terms. This dissertation consists of three chapters framed as “encounters.” An encounter, as an unplanned contact and accidental meeting, can be amicable, hostile, sexual, or neutral yet what makes it compelling is the moment when two bodies are given unprecedented space to engage, confront, intermingle, and potentially be transformed by one another. I connect the act of encountering to the induction of astonishment, excitement, or disturbance all responses to a sudden coming face to face with something overpowering or immense. Through such encounters with work that challenge and disrupt normative understandings of waste new meanings emerge and an agential capacity for plastic is revealed. Chapter One, “Encounter One: Pattie Gonia’s Plastic Dress,” sets the stage for engagement with the notion of plastic-body entanglement using the image of environmental activist drag performer, Pattie Gonia’s “Plastic Dress.” This chapter builds on drag performance’s ironic entanglement with consumption – both in its embrace of excess and flamboyance and in its irreverent defiance of the status quo- and argues that queer performance, environmental drag (eco-drag) in particular, provides a unique venue not only to question the dominance of fossil fuel industry and its disregard of planetary future, but also to hold an inescapable mirror up to everyday consumers interrogating their complicity in systems of environmental degradation and extractive capitalism. Chapter Two, “Encounter Two: Machine Dazzle’s Ouroboros,” continues with themes of queer irreverence, posthuman drag performance and its representation of human-plastic entanglement through a close analysis of Ouroboros, installation and performance created by artist, costume designer and performer Machine Dazzle at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. This Chapter demonstrates how Ouroboros rejects the industry-fueled promise of a plastic-free world and post-plastic utopia through evoking body-plastic entanglement, specifically in the runway/drag performance attached to the installation. In Chapter Three, “Encounter Three: The Plastic Bag Store,” the focus turns to the temporality of plastic in relation to the body, leading to a theorization of the temporal agency of inanimate matter as it becomes entangled with animate matter. The Plastic Bag Store, installation, and film on view in The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary of Arts (MASS MoCA) provides a lens through which such theorization is activated leading to the argument that disposable, single-use plastic items, in their foreverness satirize the utopian aspirations recycling and sustainability cultures represent. This also comes in contrast with techno-utopian ideals that hinge on technological advancements to solve not only climate crises but also improving the quality of life for all humans. The encounters in this project have an eye, albeit a cautious one, toward the utopian desire for a world free of plastic pollution. Yet the sudden, unpredictable coming face to face with reality, materiality and temporality of plastic shifts and ultimately transforms the kind of utopia it becomes possible to imagine. In each of the encounters/chapters, plastic takes center stage in defining present realities, before disrupting preconceived notions of what it can do through its entanglement with the human body.