Wash Yourself White: Race, Hygiene, and Environmental Justice in Twentieth-Century U.S. Multi-Ethnic Women's Working-Class Literature
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Date
2024-01-10
Authors
Galentine, Cassandra
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
My dissertation argues that studying literary representations of women’s labor helps us to understand the intersection of racial capitalism and environmental injustice. I examine how various twentieth-century working-class literary women characters’ positionality within the private sphere of domestic labor gives them intimate knowledge of the material conditions of poverty and resulting racial discourses of hygiene. I argue that reading dirty materials like grime, dust, and garbage and the accompanying racial discourses of hygiene as environmental justice issues in Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers (1924), Sanora Babb’s Whose Names are Unknown (written in the 1930s but not published until 2004), Ann Petry’s The Street (1946), and Alice Childress’s Like one of the Family (serially published in Paul Robeson’s Freedom 1951-1955 and re-published in 1956) reveals how such discourses re-direct the responsibility of environmental injustice away from its source, racial capitalism, and onto the individuals who bear the burden of environmental harm. I explore how women in these texts resist gendered imperatives of hygiene by foregoing cleaning rituals and embracing dirty material to reveal the limits of liberal individualism and re-focus blame on structures of power and injustice. Finally, I argue that dirt, which transgresses physical and social boundaries, becomes a central material through which these women defy the constructed borders of gender, the body, and nationhood. Resistance to sexism, racial violence, and environmental injustice demonstrated by women in these novels can provide a roadmap for feminist approaches to the same systems of oppression that persist in our racial capitalist society today.
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Keywords
Environmental Justice, Hygiene, Race, Women's Literature, Working-Class Literature