Glitter Grief Eco-Crip Affect for Mourning and Re-building

Glitter, as a form of reused waste, carries vast and diverse meaning across queer and disability communities, resonating with queer excess, aesthetic re-making by queers of color, and finding value in those bodies which have been deemed disposable. However, glitter’s environmental impact as a micro-pollutant shifts the texture of glitter’s role and impact. Glitter grief is the affective imprint created by the process of coming to understand the potential environmental harm of objects that matter to us. A practice of grieving glitter works toward ending climate crisis through intentional engagement with the devi-ant, culturally suppressed feelings surrounding environmental disaster. Glitter’s power in the mainstream cultural imaginary is imbued with a sense of magical attraction, one that is exploited to increase commercial value of commodities. In locating immaterial glitter alternatives, we not only respond to environmental crisis but resist the spell of the commodity through an anti-capitalist eco-crip queer methodology. To invoke a glitter epistemology, I examine mainstream sources across news media and environmental science, while also exploring how fringe cultural production, such as queer porn and queer disability dance practice, cultivate desire for cultural change. In this painful process of imagining glitter’s alternatives, I argue that queer and disability tactics forge something new in the rubble of queer capitalism, imagining the next iteration of queer visibility, vitally inclusive and radically accessible.

Alongside access-based sensitivities to glitter's texture, glitter is also becoming well-known as a micro-pollutant, negatively impacting water, air, and marine life. Glitter is most often made from Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET).
It accumulates in islands of trash in oceans, is swept up in the air contributing to climate change (Thompson 2021), and eventually seeps into food we eat and water we drink. When glitter has dire and nonbinaristic implications for environmental and embodied harm, the stakes of using glitter as epistemology rather than substance have grown exponentially.
Glitter's power in the mainstream cultural imaginary is imbued with a sense of magical attraction, one that is exploited to increase commercial value and sellability of commodities. In order to look deeper at glitter's essence, here I unpack the way that essence is packaged and marketed, shrouded in an industrywide sense of secrecy. I argue that this sense of magic is core to glitter's associations with transformation and is foundational to the cultivation of desire for commodities in a neoliberal global marketplace. In locating immaterial glitter alternatives, we not only respond to environmental crisis but resist the spell of the commodity in an anti-capitalist eco-crip queer affective response.
In the midst of the cultural meaning glitter carries, knowledge of the environmental harm of using glitter leaves an affective imprint I call glitter grief.
Because of the unique relationship that queer and disabled people have to visibility and thus to aesthetic strategies of visibility's alteration, these communities can offer approaches for grieving glitter. Glitter grief is descriptive of a cultural state of transition, the felt impact of phasing out affectively powerful but materially harmful objects due to environmental impact. Grieving glitter is a process of ending climate crisis through intentional engagement with the culturally unacceptable feelings surrounding environmental disaster, moving toward action and away from the emotions induced by more mainstream environmental discourse, such as fear and shame. Glitter grief is not just about mourning the things we lose if we are to salvage the environment from climate disaster. It also refers to a practice of queer mourning that acknowledges the co-presence of pleasure and ache that leaves space for a full range of attachment. To invoke a glitter epistemology that uncontainably spreads across surfaces, I examine a sprinkling of sources and objects across news media, environmental science, the cosmetics industry, and cosmetics YouTube. This approach to source material looks at the popular, the viral, and the sensational as markers of peaked cultural fascination, representative of a preoccupation with the sparkly waste created by late capitalism. At the same time, just as single-use glitter collects, forgotten, in corners and under furniture, I examine fringe cultural production, such as queer Glitter Grief. Eco-Crip Affect for Mourning and Re-building porn and queer disability dance practice to assess how these interpretations of popular culture speak back to norms and urge toward cultural change. In this painful, rusty process of imagining glitter's alternatives, I argue that queer disability tactics forge something new in the rubble of queer capitalism, imagining the next iteration of queer visibility, vitally inclusive and radically accessible.

Affective Ambivalence and Glitter's Ecological Impact
Disability studies investigates relation with environment as a critical component of what it means to be disabled, especially to be disabled, queer, and trans (Clare 1999;Morales 1998;Belser 2020). Though a central conceit of crip culture involves invoking a desire for disability (McRuer 2006), scholars like Nirmala Erevelles (2011) question whether the acquisition of disability can be celebrated without the interrogation of how global capitalism creates disability through poverty, labor exploitation and police brutality. Sunaura Taylor adds to this that environmental destruction is one of the leading causes of illness and disability, disproportionately impacting those who are already oppressed through poverty and systemic racism (2017; also Chakraborty 2020 and Nixon 2011). Thus, as I track through the environmental impact of glitter use, the embodied reverberations of its toxic travel, and the affective ambivalence around releasing our attachment to glitter, I urge the reader to keep in mind that queer and trans disabled bodies linger on the sticky frontlines of climate crisis urged eagerly on by pollutants and micro-trash, while at the same time holding tight to sparkly signifiers that reclaim visibility away from the dehumanization of the ableist gaze.
It is from this place of ambivalence that I will now track through the emotional ripples that make up glitter's affective ecologies.
Though it is hard to say exactly how toxic glitter is as few studies have assessed this, there is plenty of evidence that microplastics as a category pose a severe threat (Cole et al. 2011). Most glitters are created out of PET film, which is a plastic substance known for its chemical and dimensional stability, that is, its minimal biodegradability. A highly circulated (34K shares) 2019 Daily Mail article describes the reasoning behind scientists' call for a ban on glitter (Liberatore). The author explains that microplastics like glitter account for 92.4 percent of the total 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic polluting the ocean. Microplastics have been found in ocean-dwelling animals, including those consumed by humans, as well as in tap water, and are toxic because of their ability to absorb pollutants (Smulligan-Maldanis 2014). Following the Microbead-Free Waters Act (2015) that outlawed use of plastic microbeads in cosmetics, a ban on microplastics appears to be forthcoming in the EU, as promised by the European Commis-sion in 2021 (FDA 2020, Reuters 2020). The first study assessing the impact of glitter on the environment was published in January 2021 and found that glitter, including biodegradable glitter, mica, and synthetic mica, all impact the biodiversity of aquatic ecosystems (Green et al. 2021). All this to say, glitter use participates in a large-scale dangerous environmental problem of marine pollution. As attention is increasingly being drawn to this issue, glitter's cultural meaning is being altered through affective shifts.
Virtual cosmetics communities provide more information than any formal institutions with regard to glitter ecologies. In Lauren Mae Beauty's YouTube video "Makeup Mythbusting: Glitter -Eye Safe? FDA Approved? Environmentally Friendly?," with 27,842 views and 482 comments, the makeup vlogger deep dives into glitter's environmental impact. Her pink hair and highlighted cheekbones shimmer as she perches in front of two pink Christmas trees covered foot to bough in glittery ornaments. She asserts that glitter, though relatively safe for the human body, is extremely terrible for the environment. Lauren Mae describes the emotional journey of glitter grief: "So you might be really sad right now, I know I was really sad when I found out that basically something I love in cosmetics so much, glitter, that I shouldn't use. And then I'm like, well I want to use it anyway, and then I just feel guilty and bad for the environment." She details her downward spiral, noting that "When it's something that brings you joy, it's harder to give up." She describes the fear she felt about putting out this video, anticipating the judgment she might receive for her attraction to glitter.
Her feelings of ambivalence are manifested in her gestures: torn expression, furrowed brows, palms up and helpless.
The contradictory and paradoxical affective modes of processing the results of environmental crisis, such as those exemplified by Lauren Mae, are an example of what queer environmentalism scholar Nicole Seymour calls bad environmentalism. Bad environmentalism, according to Seymour, is environmental thought that employs dissident, often-denigrated affects and sensibilities to reflect critically on mainstream environmental art, activism, and discourse (2018, 6). Mainstream environmental discourse is dominated by either sunny optimism or doom and gloom, and both of these affects suggest a certainty about the future that can discourage action. The grief encapsulated by Lauren Mae's video dwells in this space of emotional duality, both holding the environmental consequences of microplastic pollution as well as the joy brought about through glitter use. Incorporating glitter grief into our frame for creating environmental change allows for a range of emotions in everyday response to environmental catastrophe. The video is drenched in proactive comments, from users wondering how to prevent Glitter Grief. Eco-Crip Affect for Mourning and Re-building glitter from washing down their drains to sharing tips on which makeup brand boasts the glitter with the smallest environmental impact. Because institutional guidance is limited on glitter safety and its environmental impact, users must cultivate their own best practices with the information available, a practice necessary yet problematic due to the prevalence of misinformation as well as large-scale lack of virtual accessibility (Ellis and Kent 2016).

Sensual Luminosity: Feeling Glitter's Pull
In order to understand the depths of our loss in giving up glitter, we must articulate the depths of our attachment. Here I consider affect in line with theorist Kathleen Stewart's (2007) formulation of affect as the scattered impact of everyday objects' multidirectional pull. In the midst of late capitalism and US neoliberalism, glitter as a form of reused waste resonates with queer excess, aesthetic re-making by queers of color, and finding value in that which has been deemed disposable. Its physical ability to reflect light and change the way a body is seen manifests queer, disabled, and racialized strategies of shifting the gaze via the manipulation of light.
Glitter intercepts what disabled artist and scholar Sandie Yi describes as the "evaluative gaze" that falls on queer people, especially queer and disabled people of color, and establishes and sustains social hierarchies (2010, 105). Nonbinary East Indian disabled burlesque performer Pansy St. Battie discusses the way that adornment of their devices invokes attention that has a different quality than the gaze they normally attract (Battie 2019). The burlesque stage is one of the only places where they are able to direct the ableist gaze, locating a type of freedom from objectification by reclaiming the stare. They describe their process of adorning their chair, aiming to shift social narratives around disability [2].
I just got this new chair a couple months ago and right when I got it, I spent three days painting and rhinestone-ing it. When the sun hits it, it looks like a disco ball. When you go out and use a chair, people will look at it like, Oh that's sad, this person must not be doing things with their life. When you give them something else to look at, like rhinestones, it's like, OK, if you're going to stare at me, here's something interesting that you should appreciate. (Battie 2019) Battie invokes what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson terms the "baroque stare," a stare which encourages wonder and "an unrepentant abandonment to the unruly, to that which refuses to conform to the dominant order of knowledge" selves. They contain meaning that extends into cultural imaginaries and hold value that radiates past any direct relationship between the object and its worth.
Her analysis of the racialization of light also situates shine as a Black technology of glamour. Thompson's work helps to locate queer glitter use as a strategy interwoven with and borrowing from Black aesthetic traditions of shine, an example of one of the ways queer culture is rooted in processes of appropriating Other.
Glitter disrupts models of productivity and normative desire through a rewriting Glitter Grief. Eco-Crip Affect for Mourning and Re-building of capitalism's "luminous effect," using the same effect that increases profit margins toward the end of increasing cultural conceptions of value toward those body-minds that are consistently undervalued on a mass scale.
By imagining sparkle's meaning beyond the visual, a strategy consistent with disability culture's impetus to undo the primacy of the visual known as ocularcentrism (Cachia 2019, 203), artists open up possibilities for glitter alternatives that do not simply replicate the same environmental and economic issues created by PET glitter. Glitter creates a "sensation of otherness," a disability aesthetic, according to Tobin Siebers, which exists with and without the presence of disabled bodies that marks otherness as a testament to its power, a sensation which need not be coupled with the visual to make its impact (2010, 25).

Selling Our Fairy Dust Back to Us
Glitter as a contested object of queer use shows how queerness has evolved as a neoliberal product and process that links queer bodies to excess, refuse, and capital. Glitter's relationship to capital is delineated by its history as a massproduced commodity. It was invented for commercial production in 1934 in New Jersey by Henry Ruschman, who took repurposed material from landfills and cut it up into very tiny pieces to attempt to make a profit from trash (Meadowbrook Inventions Inc.). Many contradictions around glitter use emerge when looking more closely at glitter's mass-production and the way it is sold to marginalized people as a way to express individual uniqueness and community affiliation.
When we are taught that adornments necessary to be seen for our true selves must be bought, practices of adorning are inevitably bound in a capitalist cycle, constructing a market-defined self.
The industry of glitter production shows directly how this signifier of queerness is bound up in the capitalist production its aesthetic appears to rewrite and refuse. Glitter as an industry is incredibly difficult to track. The secretive nature of glitter's production is intentionally built into the structures that make glitter sell. The podcast "Endless Thread" conducted several interviews with people involved in glitter production in their November 8th 2019 episode and detailed the connection between Henry Ruschman's secrecy around his glitter production and the industry's subsequent secrecy around uses and buyers (Wbur 2019).
The podcast creeps down the rabbit hole of an Unresolved Mysteries Reddit thread 1 that explores theories behind which industry is the biggest buyer of glitter, a question that emerged out of the widely read New York Times glitter factory exposé (Weaver 2018). The reddit thread, with 14.1k shares, explores many theories: explosives are made trackable with glitter particles, glitter is embedded in paper money or used to thwart the visibility of fighter jets (Reddit 2018). Though, as the podcast is able to deduce, it is most likely that the most lucrative glitter industry is boating equipment, the expansive interest and imagination invested in glitter's commercial use is compelling, the mystery of glitter's commercial popularity creating a winding story that only furthers its cultural associations with magic.
As it became more apparent that PET glitter is unsustainable, the market for glitter alternatives has exploded. Mica is a shimmery, naturally occurring mineral that is already used in many cosmetics. There are significant labor issues with its ethical sourcing, including the fact that it is in part sourced through child labor (Department of Labor 2020). Synthetic mica is produced from eucalyptus leaves and does not have the same environmental impact as PET or labor issues as nonsynthetic mica (Lauren Mae Beauty 2019). However, critics of environmental "alternatives assessments" urge analysis of the structural issues that influence why the toxic product is needed in the first place, asking how and why it is used (Jacobs et al 2016). It is possible that bioglitter may have a less toxic pollutant outcome but might be just as toxic to produce. These critiques of alternatives beg the question: when queer Black magic is commodified and capitalized on, who benefits? And why are we so committed to the idea that our beauty depends on consuming and depleting?

Eco-Crip Theory for Glitter Revolution
Glitter's potential for bodily harm has been integrated into its commercial appeal. In glitter lore, there is a recurring presence: a chaotic discourse around eye safety. Although there is a warning on most glittery makeup, which states the product has not been approved by the FDA (Temptalia 2020), with the amount of web traction surrounding conversations about glitter's safety, these warnings have built interest around glitter rather than diffusing it. In a glitter safety assessment, Becker et al. (2014) note that PET has been approved by the FDA in medical devices, but not in cosmetics. The authors tested many different forms of cosmetics containing glitter, concluding that it is safe for use. However, this study of under 100 participants can hardly serve as conclusive evidence for glitter safety. The authors note several adverse events of stinging and burning using glitter eyeshadow that were not addressed in their discussion beyond a note in Table 5 indicating the "very slight ocular irritant potential" (43S). Glitter's irritant potential for those who have sensory sensitivities, texture aversions, allergies, or sensitive skin appears to be unexamined in scientific literature. Those of us with access needs that deviate from normal are left to figure it out on our own.

Glitter Grief. Eco-Crip Affect for Mourning and Re-building
This crowd-sourcing happens on a mass scale in beauty vlogs and their comments sections, where vibrant discussions take place and research is shared.
Lauren Mae's discussion of eye safety addresses the 2015 thread of a person who lost her eye due to a glitter injury. The Reddit thread describes the gory saga of Erica Diaz, whose eye became infected when a speck of craft glitter got wedged inside. (Minimonster4327 2015) The ten-part post is photo-documented and has been widely circulated since 2015, with thousands of dollars donated to Diaz's Gofundme. Another makeup vlogger, FacesbyGina, put out a forty-seven minute video around glitter's safety (2019). She called the eye-loss reddit post an "extended game of telephone" that was swept into the "internet zeitgeist." This spec(k)ter of glitter as disabling continues to spread like web glitter, appearing even after it is seemingly scrubbed clean. Disability scholar Katie Ellis describes the way that spreadable media, the posts that spread culturally by being shared and re-shared, often acquire more "likes" by invoking stories about disability, noting that the promotion of these stories results in significant profit for the businesses engaging in social media platforms (Ellis 2015). The feelings that invoke re-shares such as senses of social good, existential guilt, and selfish pleasure, become entwined with marketing strategies that "farm likes," and thus travel swiftly through social media's algorithms (153). The storm of attention paid to this exceptional case of glitter danger exists within a capitalist framework where disability stories garner profit while disabled bodies are still fighting for basic needs.
The story's stickiness is indicative of the ways that disability as threat is interwoven with warnings about environmental safety. Mainstream environmentalism centers healthy nondisabled bodies as a corollary of healthy environment (Seymour 2018, 129). In the emergent field of eco-crip study, Sarah Jaquette Ray, Valerie Ann Johnson, and Alison Kafer point to the ways environmental rhetoric employs ableist assumptions toward the detriment of the movement (2017). Ray and Kafer argue for the disentangling of environmental injustice from disabled bodies, noting how environmentalism relies on the disabled body as Other to encourage change. Instead of employing disabled bodies as scare tactic, mainstream environmentalism need only look to queer disability cultural production for information on how people survive crisis in community.
When disability is used as an impetus for change by environmental campaigns, this reduces disabled bodies to their impairments, erasing the long history of disabled environmental movement leaders. Disability activism in the Bay Area, California over the last three years serves as an example of community action that saved lives and grieved losses, while simultaneously creating spaces for joy and beauty. When PG&E instituted unexpected power shutoffs in 2019 as an attempt to curb California wildfires, disability communities responded by sharing a limited supply of generators, organizing public protests, and creating a crowd-sourced survival guide (Green 2019). Sins Invalid, the Bay Area queer disabled people of color-centered performance group, virtually premiered the show, "We Love Like Barnacles: Crip Lives in Climate Chaos," responding to climate injustice. The 2020 performance highlighted the love and mourning present within queer disabled communities of color, as communities disproportionately impacted by ecological disaster, through music, dance, and poetry, all recorded according to COVID-19 safety protocols and adapted for video. The performance shed light on the ways that, as Jina Kim articulates, colonialism and capitalism produce disabling environments that have uneven global impacts, while also drawing attention to the ways that liberation must be achieved collectively (2014). In so many contexts, our trash is killing us, and we need to, with urgency, turn toward those communities who have experience holding glitter grief and glittery joy with simultaneity [3] A patchwork of screenshots from "Tiny Glitter Dances." Five dancers in motion, echoing each other's motions but substituting fingers for legs and feet for hair, while one dancer, blurry, takes a moment to rest.
Glitter Grief. Eco-Crip Affect for Mourning and Re-building

Sparkly Alternatives
Glitter's associations with magic appeal to queers who are used to casting spells as protest, dreaming up different worlds without evidence that these worlds are possible. Instead of replacing glitter's shimmery material, we can look deeper into the feeling of sparkle to imagine another way of meeting the need that glitter fills. Glitter gives us an altered visuality, repetition with a difference, creative methods of re-use, and pleasure in that which is small and eye-catching. The brief anecdote that began this article prompted my own spiral into glitter ecologies. In "Tiny Glitter Dances," the collective was interested in the way glitter allowed us as queer crips to find each other and shift the reductive ways in which we are seen [3]. The Bay Area Disabled Dance Collective values the creation of accessible modes of movement, holding that dance need not include pain or suffering, so halting our use of glitter was essential for our process. When glitter was no longer available, we invented accessible forms of shimmery visibility. To replace glitter, we shone light across mirrored surfaces: foil, water, fabrics, mesh.
Our composer, Lafemmebear, created glimmers of sound using domestic objects, remixed to create a sonic landscape otherworldly and reverberating. Lastly, our movements created echoes across each of our tiny Zoom windows. A solo, magnifying to a duet, to a quartet, gestures repeating and escalating like light skipping across sequins. Glitter as a gesture is repetition and vibration, stimming 2 and shaking, something tiny becoming exponentially larger that changes the ways we see and feel. These "translation techniques" of expanding the essence of one inaccessible component of performance into accessible dance signals a "radical shift in pedagogy" from mainstream dance's exclusionary practices that additionally provides unique creative fodder (Whatley 2019, 333). Our short dance spread across disabled queer and trans communities as a gesture of resilience. This moment of collective labor around imagining alternatives is an everyday example of queer crip processes of creating collective access, an expansive rewrite of signifiers we know to be harmful.
Environmental communication specialists have found that integrating pleasure as a component of environmental action may be essential for activating people who have been unpersuaded by environmental rhetoric (Seymour 2018, 123), just as disability scholars have long suggested a turn toward valuing pleasure in opposition to critique and skepticism (Siebers 1993). Disability Justice poet Aurora Levins Morales (2013) offers a reflection on crip sex that reworks altered visual signifiers around intimacy, where body, pleasure, and environment shudder in their entanglement. "Now I have sex as plants do, petals agape for pollen; as snails do, one sticky wet part sliding softly, infinitesimally across another. I have sex like a body of water, breath making nipples rise like the crests of waves, creeks emptying into my shimmering state of awareness through crevices, gullies, hillside torrents" (163). Morales' glitter is a reverberation of consciousness, almost still but so alive. Her glitter's repetition is of petals and waves rather than plastic, sticky as a snail's underbelly. If those signifiers that alter the ways we are seen become droplets and waves, pollen and snails, could it be that our desires for trash might mutate into desires for clean water and breathable air? Holding space for glitter grief, for unconsummated desire for sparkle, and for pleasure in the grieving process may actively propel us toward a trash-less future.
Reflecting on the queer aesthetic of pleasure, queer porn collective, Aorta's, director Mahx Capacity writes, "queerness understands that being present to our ache is necessary to fight for change, to believe that pleasure within other  [5] Evie Snax teases a lily bud with the tip of their tongue. Their blissed out face glows in the warm light from particles of glitter and a gloss of sweat, spit, and mist. Screenshot from film reproduced with permission from Aorta Collective. moss sticking to the performers' sweaty bodies as their fingers grab at the mossgreen yarn carpet below them. The glitter is fine and translucent, and like the performers' sweat and cum, is not visible in the full body shots, only in close-ups.
In moments of fingers sinking into dirt and tongues licking the dew off flower petals, an ecosexual fantasy emerges of not only intimacy covered in earth but intimacy with the earth. 3 According to Papi Femme, who consulted on costumes for the scene as well as performing, "Glitter was also important because of wanting the scene as wet as possible; glitter makes everything look dewy, and we wanted to evoke the feeling of being in a forest next to a stream" (Email message to author, May 5, 2022). He also points to the way the scene's aesthetic transports the viewer, describing it as "otherworldly." Even the process of creating the scene had an ethereal quality: "Shooting on that set full of flowers and moss, being misted, covered in glitter and sweat and dirt...it was magical," though he also notes that "soft, wet flowers make absolutely terrible floggers." Though not the central focus of the scene, glitter is an ever-present accent, and its meaning- What if the glitter in our hearts can ban the glitter in our oceans? What does a post-glitter post-trash queerness feel like? To know, we must throw glitter vigils and glitter goodbye parties, redistribute resources more equally so those on the margins do not have to wear toxic trash or feel like they are disposable. We must trash trash and build something far more sparkly in its place while we mourn.
Our pleasure and our survival depend on it.
Glitter Grief. Eco-Crip Affect for Mourning and Re-building abstract Glitter, as a form of reused waste, carries vast and diverse meaning across queer and disability communities, resonating with queer excess, aesthetic re-making by queers of color, and finding value in those bodies which have been deemed disposable. However, glitter's environmental impact as a micro-pollutant shifts the texture of glitter's role and impact. Glitter grief is the affective imprint created by the process of coming to understand the potential environmental harm of objects that matter to us. A practice of grieving glitter works toward ending climate crisis through intentional engagement with the deviant, culturally suppressed feelings surrounding environmental disaster. Glitter's power in the mainstream cultural imaginary is imbued with a sense of magical attraction, one that is exploited to increase commercial value of commodities. In locating immaterial glitter alternatives, we not only respond to environmental crisis but resist the spell of the commodity through an anti-capitalist eco-crip queer methodology. To invoke a glitter epistemology, I examine mainstream sources across news media and environmental science, while also exploring how fringe cultural production, such as queer porn and queer disability dance practice, cultivate desire for cultural change. In this painful process of imagining glitter's alternatives, I argue that queer and disability tactics forge something new in the rubble of queer capitalism, imagining the next iteration of queer visibility, vitally inclusive and radically accessible.

1
Reddit is a popular online discussion forum that has varied content from crowd-sourced legal advice to cat memes.

2
Stimming is a repetitive motion commonly associated with autism, but also present among many neurodivergent and disabled communities.
3 For more information on the Ecosexual movement see Beth Stephens' and Annie Sprinkle's "THE ECOSEX MANIFESTO 2.0."