Dirty Purity | Waste Studies | Mina Loy

Abstract

Mina Loy's aesthetic commitments were also political ones: to the value of compromised existences, wasted lives, marginalised (subject) matter, the displaced and the dirty, and mongrel forms. As a kind of super-litmus figure of the transatlantic modern, Loy's exceptional life story can tell us much about modernism. Until recently, however, Loy's voice itself has been obscured. In this thesis I have tried to listen to that beyond what Loy called in "The Widow's Jazz" the "pruned contours" of what it meant to be in the world and to speak as a fully "unwholesome" embodied modern woman. In crossing many thresholds in her lifetime--one being modernity itself--Loy interrogates authoritative waste valuation systems active in this timeframe.This thesis argues that Loy refuses both a legacy and a future of repressive (im)purity ideology as sanctioned by what might be understood as puritanical Protestantism's racial and misogynistic doctrines. Her resistance is evident in works including "Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose," "Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots," "Feminist Manifesto," "Apology of Genius,""Der Blinde Junge," "Parturition," and "Pig Cupid" (Song I). In a poetic of ethically transgressive jouissance, and in speaking of and to the discarded subject, Loy picks up the wasted Other, be she the racial, religious, impoverished, disabled, homeless, cultural, profane and/or impure Other. In humanizing and voicing redacted beings and revealing how waste discourses operate to dehumanize disciplined populations, Loy constructs and embodies an ethical aesthetic against the grain of division and displacement, a counter-poetic of dirty purity. While it is widely held that contemporary waste studies began with Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger (1966) and its enduring definition of "dirt as matter out of place", this thesis identifies that Douglas's text was in fact motivated in conversation with two previous thinkers who had defined waste and purity theory in Loy's lifetime--Reverend William Robertson Smith and Émile Durkheim (himself responding to Smith). Dirty Purity ∎Waste Studies ∎ Mina Loy elucidates each theorist's waste approaches in turn and in conversation with Loy's life and art.