Document Type
Article
Abstract
In engaging with the "culture of filth," Marisol Cortez's "Brown Meets Green: The Political Fecology of PoopReport.com" questions contemporary cultural criticism's emphasis on shit's textual ambivalence. In order to avoid relapsing into either the Bakhtinian celebration of the grotesque or the too narrowly conceived Kristevan category of the abject, Cortez argues, and to find a way out of this theoretical dualism, one must rethink the very categories of "filth" and "waste" through an ecocritical reading of the scatological -- the meeting of brown and green -- performed at the confluence of ecology, cultural studies, and Marxist political economy. This perspective on shit as a familiar and knowable part of symbolic systems is instantiated by Cortez in her study of a website dedicated to the "(relatively) intellectual appreciation of poop humor." As such, PoopReport.com realizes a remarkable thread of nascent political self-consciousness which Cortez identifies, investigates, and develops further as the concept of "shamelessness." It is in its relation to such open shameless as practiced on PoopReport.com that the scatological, read from an ecocritical point of view, may open up alternate ways of conceptualizing bodily and social economy, for agency and connection to place.
Repository Citation
Cortez, Marisol. "Brown Meets Green: The Political Fecology of PoopReport.com." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 5, no. 2, 2005, pp. 1–19. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol5/iss2/4