Against Purity
Living Ethically in Compromised Times
Alexis Shotwell
In Against Purity, Alexis Shotwell proposes a powerful new conception of social movements as custodians for the past and incubators for liberated futures. Against Purity 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.
Exciting, original, and intellectually stimulating, Against Purity makes a clear and compelling argument for a politics of relationality that resists the demand for ‘purity’. Even as Alexis Shotwell challenges the basic assumptions of ethical and political philosophy, she also builds pathways for more conventional thinkers to find their way into her discourse.
Lisa Guenther, author of Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives
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, Against Purity 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, hope 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.
$27.00 paper ISBN 978-0-8166-9864-6
$94.50 cloth ISBN 978-0-8166-9862-2
248 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2, December 2016
Alexis Shotwell is associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Department of Philosophy at Carleton University. She is author of Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding.
Exciting, original, and intellectually stimulating, Against Purity makes a clear and compelling argument for a politics of relationality that resists the demand for ‘purity’. Even as Alexis Shotwell challenges the basic assumptions of ethical and political philosophy, she also builds pathways for more conventional thinkers to find their way into her discourse.
Lisa Guenther, author of Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives
Readers will find Against Purity to be timely and important, drawing together distinct but nonetheless congruent strains of theorizing that enable and facilitate new modes of collective action.
PhænEx, Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture
On a planet overtaken by the problems and figure of man, this perspective is crucial to keep in mind for both scholarly and worldly work.
Journal of Cultural Economy
Shotwell’s clearly ordered prose makes a wide citational range easily accessible. ...Against Purity is an informative and exciting text.
Enculturation, A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing and Culture
Against Purity is a vitally important book. It offers us ways of being in the world that do not deny the thick messiness and entanglement of our interconnectedness.
Feminist Formations
Contents
Complexity and Complicity: An Introduction to Constitutive Impurity
Part I: Reckoning with a Fraught Past
1. Remembering for the Future: Reckoning with an Unjust Past
2. “Women Don’t Get AIDS, They Just Die From It”: Memory, Classification, and the Campaign to Change the Definition of AIDS
Part II: Living in an Interdependent Present
3. Shimmering Presences: Frog, Toad, and Toxic Interdependencies
4. Consuming Suffering: Eating, Energy, and Embodied Ethics
Part III: Shaping Unforeseeable Futures
5. Practicing Freedom: Disability and Gender Transformation
6. Worlds to Come: Imagining Speculative Disability Futures
Conclusion: The Point, However, Is to Change It
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About This Book
Related Publications
Related News & Events
This Is Not a Pipe Podcast: Alexis Shotwell
The Atlantic: The Folly of 'Purity Politics'
Public Books: "A Gun to Our Heads"
This Is Not a Pipe Podcast: Alexis Shotwell
"Something there feels important to me about...doing what we can from where we are, building our capacity to do more, and refusing to be convinced that it’s hopeless for us to do anything if we can’t solve everything."
The Atlantic: The Folly of 'Purity Politics'
A new book argues for the value of owning up to your imperfections.
Public Books: "A Gun to Our Heads"
“Wherever we stand in relation to the world, we can scream ‘no!’ and open the space for many yesses.”
Against Purity on Against the Grain
In our fight against the ravages of capitalism, purity is not the best way to come together collectively and change a damaged world.
Upping the Anti: Alexis Shotwell
The Virus is a Relation, article by Alexis Shotwell, author of Against Purity
Shotwell persuasively encourages her reader to accept that purity is a myth, and that if we want to live better lives--that is to say, more just lives, but also qualitatively better ones in a world that seems to be politically and environmentally deteriorating all around us--we ought to reject this myth in favor of the impure.