Dirty materialism: what Jennifer knew

Abstract

New Materialism and the Environmental Humanities challenge assumptions about human exceptionalism by telling environmental stories from diverse points of view. Combining these tendencies in thought and practice is what I call dirty theory. Dirt is both method and subject-matter, and its transdisciplinary effects are to be found in ethnography, geography, media theory, as well as in the architectural humanities. Dirt offers a means of paying attention to mundane worldly relations, including repair, maintenance and making do, and aims to foster an overarching ethics of care. In all the above, from the vantage point of the present, Jennifer Bloomer can be re-read as a precursor to whose work an incomparable novelty might be restored. What Jennifer knew, what she intimated in her work, was both an awareness of the critical implications of textual play and the importance of thinking with admixtures of environmental and socio-political subject-matter. Across her essays, from her dirty drawings to her dirty ditties, and in such installation works as the Tabbles of Bower, dirt is discovered as a creative movement. I argue that the burgeoning interest in (feminist) New Materialism and the Environmental Humanities enables a reengagement in the legacy and after-effects of Bloomer's remarkable body of work.