Refuse Work: Samuel Delany's Crip-Queer Ethics and Erotics of Waste Management Available to Purchase

This chapter examines the sanitation and waste management systems of Samuel R. Delany’s 2012 novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, which depicts a lifelong, interracial, and incestuous partnership between gay garbage workers. It is organized around the concept of “refuse work,” which carries multiple registers of meaning across Delany’s novel: (1) the literal work of sanitation infrastructure; (2) the erotic management of human waste; (3) the intimate labors of sex and care that honor the body’s needs; and (4) the refusal of an antirelational American work ethic that disavows dependency on others. Through refuse work, it demonstrates how Delany’s reverent depiction of sanitation infrastructure makes imaginable a crip-queer politics of antiwork that refuses the naturalized relationship between waged labor and independence forged by welfare-to-work narratives.