Knowing Waste: Towards an Inhuman Epistemology

Abstract

Ten years after the publication of the special issue of Social Epistemology on feminist epistemology, this paper explores recent feminist interest in the inhuman. Feminist science studies, cultural studies, philosophy and environmental studies all build on the important work feminist epistemology has done to bring to the fore questions of feminist empiricism, situated knowledges and knowing as an intersubjective activity. Current research in feminist theory is expanding this epistemological horizon to consider the possibility of an inhuman epistemology. This paper explores these developments through the subject of waste. Waste, as both an epistemological and material phenomenon, invites timely questions about possibilities for acknowledging an inhuman epistemology. These questions appear to be particularly urgent from an environmental perspective.

Keywords:

• Feminist Epistemology
• Environment
• Waste
• Inhuman

Acknowledgement

I thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for generously supporting this research.

Notes

[1] This paper refers to the terms “waste”, “trash” and “garbage” interchangeably. I recognise some authors distinguish the terms, for instance as absolute (garbage) and relative (waste) terms (see Kennedy 2007).

[2] Defining waste is also be an exercise in irony. In western cultures, for instance, human placentas are defined as waste (indeed, of the biohazardous kind), which allows them to be collected for scientific research. As soon as this biohazardous waste enters the placentologist’s laboratory, it is an object of study. By contrast, Maori people in New Zealand define placentas as a highly symbolic material representation of kinship and spirit. Ironically, this determination leads some cultures to bury placentas in the ground, albeit apart from landfills and with a different meaning. (See Scott 2012.)

[3] We might argue the placenta is waste prior to urine and feces. In western cultures, placentas are often considered bio-hazardous waste and are either incinerated or used for scientific experimentation. In nonwestern cultures, placentas are highly symbolic material spiritual entities, gifts to the earth and so on. (See Scott 2012.)

[4] For research on slime moulds, fungi and bacteria see http://www.matsutakeworlds.org/, Hird (2009); http://www.slimoco.ning.com, Tsing (2005).

[5] Kennedy highlights the link between waste and human exceptionalism when he observes, “… [human] bodily wastes symbolize the obstinacy of our ‘lower’ animal nature and the latter’s pitiable inability to live up to the directives and imperatives of pure reason” (Kennedy 2007, 9).

[6] For a discussion of humans being of nature, see Barad (2012a).