Glitterworlds: The Future Politics of a Ubiquitous Thing

Glitter is everywhere, from crafting to make-up, vagazelling to glitter-bombing, fashion to fish. Glitter also gets everywhere. It sticks to what it is and isn’t intended to, and travels beyond its original uses, eliciting affects and emotions from delight to irritation. Glitterworlds examines this ubiquity of glitter, following it as it moves across different popular cultural sites or worlds, and exploring what it does to understandings and experiences of gender, sexuality, class and race. Chapters explore how girls engage with glitter in collaging workshops to imagine their futures; its adornment of the outside and inside of the body; how it features in the films Glitter and Precious; and LGBTQ* activist glitter bombing of homophobic and transphobic people. Throughout the book is an attention to the plurality of politics that glitter generates, which it approaches through the concepts of hope, wonder, fabulation and pre-figurative politics, all of which indicate the makings of different, better worlds, although often not in ways that are straightforward or would be deemed a success. Glitterworlds develops an original account of future politics, where time is non-linear and sometimes non-progressive. It brings together feminist cultural theory, feminist new materialisms and theories on futures and temporality to propose that glitter be understood as a thing that traverses boundaries between media and material, culture and nature, bodies and environments.