Abstract
Glitter has long been seen as a somewhat frivolous, superficial material. And yet, as the extent of the ecological damage wrought by microplastics becomes clear, glitter’s frivolity is rapidly mutating into a much more serious matter of environmental concern. Glitter, it seems, embodies the recklessness of humanity’s petrochemical desires.
Rebecca Coleman’s Glitterworlds brings some much-needed nuance to these debates. The book takes its readers on a journey through the future politics of this strangely ubiquitous material, pluralising glitter’s agentic capacities in ways that problematise the moralising dismissal of its ‘artificial’ materiality. The material politics of glitter, Coleman argues, is fraught with ambiguity: it requires a language that can push beyond assertions of glitter’s inherent harmfulness in order to understand the myriad ways that we humans – ambiguous creatures that we are – find ourselves affected by its luminous worlds.
There are three main conceptual frameworks at play in this project, each amplifying a particular facet of glitter’s world-making capacities: from feminist cultural theory, Coleman spotlights the significance of glitter as an overlooked material in the production (and contestation) of social structures; feminist new materialism provides a means of articulating the agentic force of glitter as a lively ‘thing’, located somewhere between material and medium; finally, Coleman turns to science and technology studies to think through glitter’s implication in the production of futurity. These three strands are synthesised throughout the course of the book in ways that refract the politics of gender, sexuality, class and race through the luminous materiality of glitter.
The issue of glitter’s environmental harms is addressed in Chapter 2. While not wishing to dismiss these harms, Coleman examines how recent calls to ban glitter tend to fall back on uncritical notions of a pure ‘Nature’ devoid of cultural artifice. From Chapter 3 onwards, Coleman turns her attention to the role played by glitter in the affectual and non-representational organisation of gendered, classed and raced bodies. Chapter 3 intervenes in the production of gender by using collaging as a methodology for getting at the luminous assemblage of girlhood. Chapter 4 is the book’s stand-out chapter: here, Coleman follows glittery affects through the body’s folds and fluids, charting the classed politics of medicalisation that accompany contemporary practices of ‘vagazzling’. And in Chapter 5, Coleman transports readers to the cinematic landscapes of glitter in an analysis of the racial politics of luminosity.
Central to Coleman’s analyses is, I think, the ambiguity of glitter as a conduit for affect. Glitter can re-enforce cultural norms and representational stereotypes, yet its luminous affect is never quite reducible to these established structures. This point is touched upon in Chapter 6, the book’s final substantive chapter, where Coleman examines the use of ‘glitter-bombing’ by members of the LGBTIQ+ community to re-imagine politics in more performative terms. The future politics of glitter are, for this reason, intimately tied to the ambiguity of affect: a shard of luminosity catches the eye in a way that stops ‘[the] future unspooling (seemingly) inevitably from the past and present’ (p. 140). Coleman’s Glitterworlds will thus be of interest to cultural geographers currently researching the interface of materiality, affect and politics.
