Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times

Employing perspectives from sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and critical memory practices, author Alexis Shotwell argues against purism because it shuts down the field of possibility that would allow us to take collective action against environmental damage. Calling purism a “de-mobilizing politics of despair,” Shotwell explores the causes and consequences of purism’s response to issues such as pollution, disease, and climate change, and reveals the roots of this response in colonialism and racism. Some subjects explored include disability and gender transformation, and the campaign to change the definition of AIDS. Shotwell’s previous book is Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding. Annotation ©2017 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
The world is in a terrible mess. It is toxic, irradiated, and full of injustice. Aiming to stand aside from the mess can produce a seemingly satisfying self-righteousness in the scant moments we achieve it, but since it is ultimately impossible, individual purity will always disappoint. Might it be better to understand complexity, and, indeed, our own complicity in much of what we think of as bad, as fundamental to our lives? Against Purity argues that the only answer—if we are to have any hope of tackling the past, present and future of colonialism, disease, pollution, and climate change—is a resounding yes. Proposing a powerful new conception of social movements as custodians for the past and incubators for liberated futures, AgainstPurity undertakes an analysis that draws on theories of race, disability, gender, and animal ethics as a foundation for an innovative approach to the politics and ethics of responding to systemic problems.Being against purity means that there is no primordial state we can recover, no Eden we have desecrated, no pretoxic body we might uncover through enough chia seeds and kombucha. There is no preracial state we could access, no erasing histories of slavery, forced labor, colonialism, genocide, and their concomitant responsibilities and requirements. There is no food we can eat, clothes we can buy, or energy we can use without deepening our ties to complex webbings of suffering. So, what happens if we start from there?Alexis Shotwell shows the importance of critical memory practices to addressing the full implications of living on colonized land; how activism led to the official reclassification of AIDS; why we might worry about studying amphibians when we try to fight industrial contamination; and that we are all affected by nuclear reactor meltdowns. The slate has never been clean, she reminds us, and we can’t wipe off the surface to start fresh—there’s no fresh to start. But, Shotwell argues, there is hope to be found in a kind of distributed ethics, in collective activist work, and in speculative fiction writing for gender and disability liberation that opens new futures.