Addressing 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 people resist unsustainable patterns of the plastics-industrial complex through imperfect but impactful networked cultures of care.
Table of Content
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: Care amid Oceans of Trouble
1. #There Is No Away: Carbon-Heavy Masculinity and the Life/Death Cycle of Plastics
2. Have a Coke and a #Footprint Calculator: The Myth of Recycling and Transnational
Greenwashing
3. From #Ban Plastics KE to #ISupport Ban Plastics KE: Pissed Off Online, Picturing Participation,
and Policing Pollution in Kenya
4. Engaging #Strawless In Seattle and #Stop Sucking: The Loneliest Whale, Sporting Fun, and
American Exceptionalism
5. #Suck It Ableism Intervenes: Eco-normative Shaming, Voicing Justice, and Planetary Fatalism
6. Creating #Toi Chon Ca (#IChoose Fish): Trauma, Affective Art, and Big Tech Dominance
Conclusion: #Break Free(From Plastics)
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Phaedra C. Pezzullo is Associate Professor of Communication, Media Studies, Environmental Studies, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of multiple books, including Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice. She is a founding codirector of the Center for Creative Climate Communication and Behavior Change.
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