2025/05/04 by Almudena Machado-Jiménez · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Cinema and Media Studies #Contemporary Literature and Criticism #Gender, Feminism, and Media
paper · doi:10.1080/13825577.2025.2510626
openalex publication_date 2025/05/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
This research expounds from a feminist perspective on the parallelisms between Bauman’s modernisation and the conception of patriarchal utopias in our neoliberal era through the exegesis of Katz’s novel The Orchid Nursery and its representation of dissenting beings as human waste. For this, I overview the coercive and hegemonic mechanisms employed to administer power through differential vulnerability and grievability, thus displaying how the stigma of dissidents is psycho-politically configured as well as physically affixed on their bodies. Tyler’s (2020) stigma politics, in what James (2014) calls our contemporary MRWaSP (Multi-Racial White Supremacist Patriarchal) era – especially when pictured in its dystopian representations, turns the stigmatisation and commodification of those bodies as necessary for the common good and even as desirable among individuals in the promise of achieving ennoblement and perfection afterwards. The fallacy of perfectibility exposes that the strategic ennoblement of the stigmatised effectively reinforces their instrumentalisation as human waste, while also questioning the very concept of “wasted” as “useless” or “unprofitable” – for, as Katz (2015) concludes, these lives “too have their purpose” (107).