On Oct. 1, 2022, Marisa Solomon, assistant professor of women's, gender, and sexuality studies, published new research in GLQ (A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies). The article, titled “Ecologies Elsewhere: Flyness, Fill, and Black Women's Fugitive Matter(s),” moves beyond white environmental imagination to explore spaces where living is predicated on knowing with, through, and sometimes as waste.
Coming out of a larger project that examines the anti-Black geographies of "long-distance" waste management, she makes the case that waste infrastructure preserves the value of white properties while creating absentee spaces of Black condemnation. Professor Solomon shows that stealing, stealing, salvaging, telling, and labor waste are themselves critiques of how property orders the planet, and that they are ecological practices developed elsewhere. Following Betty, a Black sex worker in Virginia's Tidewater region, she carefully considers the analytics of flyness, filling out, and queer Black relational geometries. Her analysis demonstrates that proximity to garbage reflects fugitive gender articulations. Constantly moving at the junction of Blackness as “a waste of space,” Professor Solomon's scrutiny over flyness creates an ecological perspective for reconsidering the substance that matters.