Beads, Bodies, and Trash

Public Sex, Global Labor, and the Disposability of Mardi Gras

David Redmon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317653097
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Beads, Bodies, and Trash merges cultural sociology with a commodity chain analysis by following Mardi Gras beads to their origins. Beginning with Bourbon Street of New Orleans, this book moves to the grim factories in the tax-free economic zone of rural Fuzhou, China. Beads, Bodies, and Trash will increase students' capacity to think critically about and question everyday objects that circulate around the globe: where do objects come from, how do they emerge, where do they end up, what are their properties, what assemblages do they form, and what are the consequences (both beneficial and harmful) of those properties on the environment and human bodies? This book also asks students to confront how the beads can contradictorily be implicated in fun, sexist, unequal, and toxic relationships of production, consumption, and disposal. With a companion documentary, Mardi Gras Made in China, this book introduces students to recording technologies as possible research tools.

1

INTRODUCTION

Scene One: Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras

“Hey, you!” a young woman shouts over the swelling noises on Bourbon Street. “Why don’t you have beads? You need beads!”

“Why do I need beads?” I ask. I’m 20 years old and the frantic chaos of Mardi Gras, while energizing, also leaves me with an uncomfortable feeling of entering a scene I’m not entirely prepared to experience. “So you can trade them for kissing, sex and other kinds of fun,” she states plainly. Of course this seems entirely logical on this day of revelry in New Orleans.

She introduces herself as Catherine, a college student like myself, and immediately wraps beads around my neck yelling, “Give me a kiss!” Before I can respond, she clumsily leans over and forces her wet tongue into my dry mouth. I instantly taste the rawness of her cigarette-laden saliva laced with whisky, lemon, and crawdads.

As she suctions my tongue and squeezes my hand, I try to break free, but she won’t let go. She pushes harder and I struggle, wiggling my neck this way and that. Her friends laugh, snapping photos. When she finally pulls back seconds later, it seems like minutes have passed. Her friends continue snapping away, as if the spectacle is a visual token. As Catherine walks off, her arms wrapped around a friend’s shoulders, she yells, “Goodbye! You’re lucky number twenty-four!”

Bemused, my friend Shelly, with whom I had traveled to New Orleans, says, “Congratulations! You just made out with twenty-three other people.”

Just a few moments later, a young man in a college T-shirt waddles up to Shelly with his pants unzipped. He starts a lively negotiation for beads and leans over to whisper in Shelly’s ear. Shelly lets out a laugh and exclaims in her Southern drawl, “Oh my gawd!” The giggly crowd eggs her on.

Laughing nervously, Shelly takes a shot of tequila from the man, then begins to masturbate him in plain sight. As her hand moves back and forth, he raises his arms into the air, indicating some kind of masculine triumph, and smiles to his friends as they repeatedly chant, “Go, Mike, go!”

Mike is clearly drunk. He can barely stand upright as his penis lies limp like a sock in Shelly’s hand. She pulls and jerks as his friends pour beer over the act. Mike raises his head toward the heavens as Shelly laughs uncomfortably and exclaims, “Is that enough? Is that enough?” Shelly stops jerking as soon as Mike’s friends intervene and say, “Okay, that’s enough.” They then place beads around her neck, all the while chanting and gesturing to another member of their group, shouting, “Scott, you’re next!”

As we walk away, Shelly proudly displays her new set of green plastic beads. It is her first acquisition in what would become an all-you-can-earn ritualized gift exchange in which there is no money transaction at all (Shrum and Kilburne, 1996), aside from the initial purchase of the beads. By now, my sociological sensibilities are fully engaged. An environment that encourages free-market excess of exchanging saliva, nudity, and beads for seemingly mutual pleasure! I want to know more about this ritual and what it all means to the revelers who participate in it. I remove my sound recorder, grab my still camera, and immediately start interviewing revelers on Bourbon Street.

Over the course of six days, I meet hundreds of revelers and observe thousands of beads exchanged for kisses and sexual acts. The nudity and sex acts, however, remain confined to Bourbon Street and rarely, if ever, occur in the parade routes outside of the French Quarter, where the more innocent, if still chaotic, role of the plastic beads is one of gifts tossed by krewes to hundreds of thousands revelers who catch them eagerly.¹

On our final day, Shelly and I leave the French Quarter to find her parked car. Trash surrounds us everywhere. Beads are strung across trees and the wind tosses around abandoned plastic cups. Dump trucks and trash machines busily buzz back and forth, vacuuming beads strewn across streets. Shelly has accumulated several hundred beads of her own and, collectively, they weigh about 20 pounds. To my surprise, she approaches a trashcan, removes her beads, and drops them inside. Discarding the beads is not unusual during Mardi Gras. It conforms to a ritual of disposability performed by numerous revelers just before they return home. As for myself, I return home with nearly twelve hours of recorded interviews, a notebook full of observations, dozens of photos, and a severe case of strep throat. I also have my own bead collection from participating in the exchange of beads for kisses—although only for kisses, as flashing others, let alone all the acts that could follow, was too far outside my comfort zone.

Scene Two: A Mardi Gras Bead Factory in Fuzhou, China

I am inside a factory in rural China where Mardi Gras beads are made. Here, I meet Ling Ling, an eighteen-year-old woman who works fifteen-hour shifts repeating the same task on the production line.

“I use my left hand to put the beads in the machine, my right hand to pull out the beads. Then I close the door, pull out the beads, close the door, pull out the beads, close the door—and repeat it all day. After I pull out the beads, I put them into two bags,” she tells me with the help of my translator, Ms. Zheng.

Ling Ling says she and others at Tai Kuen (pronounced “tycoon”) factory work long hours six to seven days a week but earn very little in return for their contribution.

“Too little. It’s incredibly little,” she says. “Take me, as an example. The most I’ve made this year is 500 yuan [US $62] per month, not yet 600 yuan [US $75].”

Asked why she works at the factory, Ling Ling says she has few other options.

“Those of us who are not well-educated and don’t have a good family background have no choice but to work hard and support ourselves,” she says. “It’s very hard. A whole day of work is very tiring, and the time for rest is very short. Everyone is exhausted, and the salary is very low. To tell you the truth, everyone here … well, there’s a saying, ‘It’s really tiring to make a living.’”

Ling Ling sits uncomfortably on a wooden stool as she stares into a large metal machine, surrounded by fans that blow hot air around the factory. She is working toward her fifteenth hour on her shift, and has pulled some 400 pounds of beads out of the machine—roughly the same amount of time it would take a reveler to collect half as many beads during Mardi Gras. Producing 400 pounds of beads earns a Chinese worker roughly the equivalent of US $2, about the same as the cost of one cheap bead in New Orleans.

The factory workers must meet production quotas listed on a chalkboard. Meet the quota, and they get Sunday off. Exceed the quotas, and they get a bonus. Fail to meet the quota, and their pay is docked.

“If you get less than this quantity, there is a 5-percent punishment,” says factory owner Roger Wong, who makes US $2 million per year. “Otherwise, they will go to toilet too much.”

“We have a regulation,” Roger says. “No woman is allowed to go to the men’s room, and no man is allowed to go to the women’s room. When we catch people who don’t want to listen to our regulations, then we punish them. Well, how do we punish them? We punish them by stopping pay for one month.”

Wong touts his management skills and his factory as “A-grade.”

“It means we are one of the top ten factories in this town,” he says.

But the long hours and the numerous punishments leave workers like Ling Ling clinging to what they have, never mind dreaming of more.

“The quality of living is low and poor. I have to work overtime every day, which makes me exhausted,” she says. “And when the products do not meet the quality standard, he will also deduct money from us. It’s never easy here. I feel really sad when they deduct 100 yuan [US $12.50]. It’s hard to let go of it. One week! It takes one week for us to earn up to 100 yuan.”

Ling Ling’s extremely regimented life is a world away from Mardi Gras’ hedonistic atmosphere. Inside the factory, the heavy dullness of strict regimens is palpable; there is no room for excess or reckless abandon. Enforced conformity, docking of pay, punishment through isolation and shaming, and control of intricate details of workers’ lives are the characteristics of this total institution. And unlike the reveler’s body, a sensuous symbol of carefree celebration at Mardi Gras, the laborer’s body is treated as an extension of the machine, moving according to the rhythm and pace of the machine’s needs, not its own.

Scene Three: The VerdiGras Movement

Holly Groh, a retired medical doctor who worked the emergency room in New Orleans, shows me a handful of plastic beads:

I’m not sure how these plastic beads became so coveted. They certainly were not around when I was a kid. But in the last few years I’ve seen them everywhere. They’re a part of our city, but there’s a downside to the plastic beads.

Holly spearheaded the organization VerdiGras, a local New Orleans organization that encourages sustainable, ecologically safe beads. “Our organization is about the show, not the throw. There’s too much excess, too much plastic involved with Mardi Gras.” Holly’s husband, Kirk, agrees:

“Our goal is to get back to what made Mardi Gras special. It’s about the livelihood, sharing of food, community spirit, and love of life. It’s not about accumulating as many plastic beads as you can. It’s not about the oil or the polyethylene.

Holly and Kirk insist that their goal to focus on the toxicity in plastic beads is not to demonize China. “The beads mirror a much greater problem,” Kirk and Holly tell me:

When businesses invest in Chinese factories, it removes money from New Orleans. It lessens the opportunities for employment in Louisiana. It’s common knowledge now that numerous jobs have been exported overseas. And when those jobs go, the money that’s reinvested in downtown districts is gone, too. That’s why we’re hoping that what we’re trying to do will focus on more local and sustainable jobs in origin. It’s a key way to create local jobs, and the benefits aren’t just economic. There’s a lot of positives to being outside with your neighbors and meeting new people. It’s not just about the stuff.

Holly and Kirk discuss possible solutions, such as incentives and tax breaks, for businesses that manufacture products in New Orleans or in Louisiana:

We live in a creative city and we think artists and entrepreneurs here can solve this problem. Currently, plastic beads are made in China and then those beads are shipped to New Orleans. The majority of them end up in landfills. Less than 3 percent are recycled. We’re talking about millions and millions of beads. That’s a big problem. We want to educate children about these problems. They are the future of New Orleans.

Collectively, VerdiGras and all the related organizations within it are transforming the symbolism of the plastic bead into a sensual stigma by making it corporeally and ecologically problematic, thereby locally changing the collective consciousness about the community’s aesthetic relationship to plastic beads. In other words, the VerdiGras activists are creating a new sensual orientation, moral order, and collective conscience based on how they believe carnival could be structured. Holly and Kirk are not the only ones who believe plastic beads are a problem. One reveler based in New Orleans told me:

I avoid those plastic beads when I can. We’re getting smarter and we know what’s going on. We need to send a message that we don’t want those plastic products here anymore. But we do want to maintain our creative ways to celebrate and have fun. Buying plastic beads made in China is not fun or creative. If you go to Bourbon Street, everyone will be wearing beads because they are enamored by what the beads represent. But we are far from what the beads represent.

I ask what the beads represent,

“Trash, oil, exploitation—everything we don’t want.”

Another reveler told me:

It’s just a lot of trash. People reuse them, but I don’t want them. There’s a recent conference called Greening the Gras, about greening Mardi Gras. It involves not only recycling Mardi Gras beads but creating hand-made throws. It’s sponsored by VerdiGras. They do wonderful things, so it’s a great way to show what more we can do not only to make Mardi Gras more artistic but to keep the beads out of the landfill, etc. And if you do catch beads, rather than throw them away, there are several organizations that will collect them and resell them for nonprofit organizations… . You’ll find great ways to find recycled and handmade throws that will bring the industry and also local manufacturing.

A Multi-site Ethnographic Journey

An examination of these contrasting worlds of the festival and the factory formed the basis of my documentary, Mardi Gras: Made in China, the release of which preceded this book. The third organization of focus, VerdiGras, emerged in New Orleans shortly after I released Mardi Gras: Made in China, and I continued to film and ethnographically document the organization and others that developed as I followed their story of discovering the toxic chemicals in the properties of beads. This book expands on the ethnographic journey of the film in which I trace the plastic Mardi Gras beads from a factory in China—where they’re made by workers who have little to celebrate or give up—to Bourbon Street, where they are celebrated, derided, abandoned, and sometimes given new life, and to the landfills, recycling organizations, and the groups that are creating alternatives to plastic beads.

A central thesis threads together the chapters in this book. I argue that the senses shape, form, and govern the commodity chain of Mardi Gras beads. I approach this argument by foregrounding the sensual relations of touch, taste, sight, sound, and smell as corporeal experiences that organize and give shape to social relations. I focus, in particular, on how the material of sensualities—taste, mouths, tongues, eyes, ears, hands, textures of tactility, and physical movements of bodies—intertwine with the political economy to produce a commodity chain. Tracing the social relations of sensuality by following Mardi Gras beads identifies how seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, or tasting these connections creates and establishes patterns of social order. In this framework, my argument advances the literature on sensuality by demonstrating that a commodity chain is a corporeal association of assembled senses that fuses with the economy as a seemingly reified sensual object that, in turn, governs and reproduces what has recently been labeled a sensual sphere (Tucker, 2012).

Conceptually, I aim to understand the beads as sensory objects that both unite and divide people through their ex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Mardi Gras: Made in China
• 3 Elementary Forms of Sensual Life
• 4 Mardi Gras: Made in New Orleans
• 5 Sensory Sphere and Somatic Commodity Chains
• 6 Becoming a Video Ethnographer
• References
• Index