Review: Rebecca Coleman, ‘Glitterworlds. The Future Politics of a Ubiquitous Thing’
Review of Rebecca Coleman’s Glitterworlds. The Future Politics of a Ubiquitous Thing (Goldsmiths Press, 2020), 166 pages.
Abstract
Bringing together new materialism, feminist cultural studies and theories of social time and futures, Rebecca Coleman proposes a framework and method for analysing glitter as a cultural phenomenon. By ‘following the thing’ – glitter – across multiple domains, or worldings, she demonstrates how this is both media and material; how it is both alive and lively and how it is involved in creating futures that are open-ended and dynamic. Through the juxtaposition of these case studies that range from the micro to the macro level, Coleman generates new insights into the politics of glitter and its affective capacities.
Reviewed by Signe Ravn
“‘Glitter’s applications are limitless”. This is the first sentence in Rebecca Coleman’s latest book, a quote from the website of the company founded by the machinist who invented glitter. With this innovative book, Coleman demonstrates that the applications of glitter indeed are limitless, or at least beyond imaginable; I for one had not anticipated an in-depth, sociological analysis of glitter. By following glitter across multiple sites or ‘worldings’, this also becomes a book about temporality, gender and sexualities, race, media, and creative research methods and in that sense the book has something to offer to a wide array of readers who will likely read it in very different ways.
The book’s point of departure is an ambition to follow glitter across a range of domains. This enables Coleman to “bring(s) together a disparate range of worlds that are connected through following glitter but that might not otherwise have been brought into the same space/time” (p. 27). This constellation of what can be seen as distinct case studies - from micro-level interactions in a classroom to LGBTQ* politics on a national (US) scale – that are nevertheless linked both thematically and analytically is a real strength of the book. Although the analytical chapters (Chapters 3-6) can be read independently of each other, it is the juxtaposition of the cases, as the reader joins the author in following glitter to where it takes her, that shows the depth of the argument. Coleman draws on a broad set of frameworks to underpin her analyses, combining new materialism, feminist cultural theory and sociological accounts of temporality. Through this she conceptualises glitter as both media and material; as a thing with material qualities and a life but also a thing that is communicative.
Coleman’s aim in the book is to “highlight the array of affects and effects through which glitter is currently understood and experienced and to complicate the idea of a pure nature being contaminated by artificial culture” (p. 10). This dichotomy between nature and culture runs through the book as a theme that is critically scrutinised through a focus on the ‘politics of glitter’. This happens both in relation to current controversies surrounding the use of glitter due to its negative environmental effects, but also in relation to the gendered and classed judgments of the users of glitter. This is perhaps most strongly articulated in Chapter 4, ‘‘Sparkle from the Inside Out’: Vagazzling, Vagina Glitter Bombs and Moments of Magic’. In this chapter we learn about two vagina beautification practices that both involve glitter: first, vagazzling as the application of glitter or crystals to the pubic mound to make this ‘bedazzling’ (p. 80) and second, the ‘glitter bomb’ which is a capsule with a glitter material that dissolves once inside the body, resulting in sparkly vaginal discharge (p. 89). As Coleman unpacks these two case studies it becomes clear not only how these practices are felt as empowering and create feelings of potentiality and change in the lives of the young women who use these products – an analysis that in itself is powerful and important – but also how they are contested practices. That is, we witness the clashes between (largely working-class and/or less educated) users/consumers and a very middle-class medical/expert profession that condemns the products under the guise of a concern with risk (rather than pleasure; a long-standing binary in critical drug studies for instance) but end up revealing their own distaste and disgust for such products, and by extension the users of such products, as being ‘tacky’ (p. 92). The ideal of the ‘natural’ body, which should be protected from (certain) ‘artificial’ intrusions is not a neutral ideal, but one that operates with white middle-class bodies and perceptions as the norm. While Coleman does not explicitly mention these, the chapter brings associations to groundbreaking work by both Beverley Skeggs’ on respectability and the ‘trouble’ with working-class femininity (Skeggs, 1997) as well as Mary Douglas’ work on ‘Purity and danger’ (1966/2002). Coleman’s focus is on the different ‘worldings’ made here: the ‘risky futures’ that the medical profession foresees versus the ‘enchanted (near) futures’ that the young women anticipate, and on the different ways in which bodies are seen and known.
Closest to my own immediate research interests is Chapter 3, ‘Shimmering Futures: Girls, Luminosity and Collaging as Worldmaking’, which ties together creative methods, girlhood studies/femininities and imagined futures. Here Coleman focuses on a structured collaging workshop conducted with teenage school girls centring around the girls’ imagined futures. The collaging method is approached as “a material and temporal method, that is, a method that materially engages time” (p. 62), and also as a method that actively shapes the data it generates (see for instance Savage 2013; Harris & Coleman 2020 on ‘the social life of methods’). This becomes visible in the latter part of the chapter where we get a glimpse of the analytical potential of the method but also in the strikingly positive affects that the method generated – which in some ways can be seen as being built into the method through its emphasis on playfulness and fabulation, thereby enabling “the possibilities of the future” (p. 75) to be opened up rather than shut down or narrowed. This is an important point for future studies: to seek to foster this ‘opening up’ via methodological choices. While the chapter starts out by describing how the girls in the workshop were “overtaken” (p. 57) by glitter, Coleman goes on to acknowledge that this may not be surprising given the strong link between contemporary girl/youth culture and glitter or sparkle. Coleman here makes brief reference to post-feminism and postfeminist analyses of glitter as signifying girls’ and young women’s empowered ‘luminosity’ (a point that she returns to in subsequent chapters) but also makes it clear that this is beyond her own focus here; a very reasonable choice but nevertheless something I would have loved to see more of. However, this is not a weakness of the book, more a reflection of this reader’s own interests.
A key point that runs through all chapters in the book is how “glitter is involved in worldings” (p. 2), that is, in creating or ‘fabulating’ futures that are fictional, unfinished and open-ended but ultimately better than the present. In that sense glitter – as media as well as material – is future-oriented. Herein lies both the potential and the future politics of glitter. In formulating this argument Coleman draws on Munoz’ (2009) work on hope and queer futurity as well as the concept of Afro-fabulation. Following this path, she ultimately insists on allowing her research participants (in the workshop but also ‘participants’ in the sense of the young women who are the subject of analysis in other chapters) to fabulate; to imagine futures that may or may not come about but which nevertheless create positive affects and effects in the present, without cutting them short through a structural analysis. Futures are affective and can be both hopeful and fearful (p. 38); in any case they are felt in the present and are important as such. Through this argument, Coleman contributes to “re-enchanting the future” (Mandich 2019, p. 13), that is, underlining the importance of affect, utopias and hope in the sociology of time generally and specifically in the literature on futures.
The book concludes with an ‘Interventions’ section that follows the coda chapter. This section, which includes examples of collages from the collage workshop as well as other artwork (printed on thick, shiny paper), serves two purposes. First, it allows the reader to see examples of the collages (Fig 3.1-3.11) that satisfies the reader’s curiosity when reading the analysis of these in Chapter 3. Second, they also hint as yet other glitter worldings that could have been part of an analysis of glitter. In that sense, the book ends by opening up new possibilities for analysis rather than closing down and reaching ‘the end’, much like the open-ended nature of glitter itself.
One of Coleman’s key points is that glitter is lively and affective – it enthuses participants in a workshop, it empowers women who have their vaginas ‘vagazzled’, and frightens and frustrates politicians who are ‘glitter bombed’. Glitter also “struck” (p. 35) the author and drew her towards the specific instances of ‘glitter worldings’ analysed in the book. But the affective capacities of glitter also extend to include me as a reader. I was drawn towards this book in the first place and after reading it I am fascinated and enchanted – by glitter itself, and by the many layers of insight that Coleman’s analyses generate. The book is an innovative piece of work that only becomes more sophisticated as new layers are unpacked and discovered.
References
Douglas, M (2002 [1966]): Purity and danger. An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge.
Harris, E. & Coleman, R (2020): The social life of time and methods: Studying London’s temporal architectures. Time & Society, early online.
Mandich, G. (2019) Why Sociology Needs Anticipation? In: Poli, R. (ed) Handbook of Anticipation. Theoretical and Applied Aspects of the Use of Future in Decision Making. Springer International Publishing.
Munoz, J.E (2009) Cruising Utopia. The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press.
Savage, M (2013) The ‘Social Life of Methods’: A Critical Introduction. Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 30(4): 3-21.
Skeggs, B. (1997) Formations of class and gender. Becoming Respectable. London: Sage.
Further Reading
Savage, M (2013) The ‘Social Life of Methods’: A Critical Introduction. Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 30(4): 3-21.
Mansfield, N (2018) Review of Vicky Kirby (ed.), What if Culture Was Nature All Along? Theory, Culture & Society.
Scharff, C (2014) Gender and Neoliberalism: Exploring the Exclusions and Contours of Neoliberal Subjectivities. Theory, Culture & Society.
Signe Ravn is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on youth, risk, processes of marginalisation, gender and temporality as well as qualitative methodologies. Her recent work is published in Sociology, Current Sociology, Feminist Media Studies and Cultural Sociology and she is currently working on a co-edited book on Youth beyond the city (Bristol University Press). She is the one half behind the newly launched podcast series Narrative Now.
Twitter: @Ravn_Signe
