David Redmon - Beads, Bodies, and Trash: Public Sex, Global Labor, and the Disposability of Mardi Gras

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.

Beads, Bodies, and Trash is a work of sensory ethnography appropriate for courses in gender and sexuality; qualitative or ethnographic research methods; deviance; social movements; globalization; and social problems.

David Redmon, Ph.D. is a Lecturer in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, University of Kent at Canterbury. He has produced, directed, edited and photographed Mardi Gras: Made in China (2005), Kamp Katrina (2007), Intimidad (2008), Invisible Girlfriend (2009), Girl Model (2011), Downeast (2012), Kingdom of Animal (2012), Night Labor (2013), and Choreography (2014). Redmons intimate and intricately crafted documentaries have premiered at Sundance, Toronto, and Viennale Film Festivals and have won a variety of awards. Redmons work has aired on PBS, POV, BBC, CBC, DR, ARTE, NHK, and other television stations throughout the world. Redmon received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University at Albany, State University of New York and is an alumni of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University and Harvard Universitys Film Studies Center. Beads, Bodies and Trash is something quite new. A gripping memoir of intellectual inquiry, it tells the story of the making of Mardi Gras: Made in China, the very best filmic treatment of globalization that follows the travels of inexpensive plastic beads from the Chinese factory where they are produced to Bourbon Street in New Orleans where they are transmogrified into tokens for purchasing attention and sexual favors from strangers in that citys extraordinary annual bacchanal. What makes this book remarkable is how it brings us along on the physical and intellectual journey embarked on by the author. We glide from engaging ethnographic description to methodological discovery and advice, to theoretically illuminating meditations on our relations to our bodies, the things we prize, and the global circulation of commodities that so animates our lives. Beads, Bodies and Trash adds a new dimension to the film by exploring what happens to the environment when the beads die and go to their final resting place in landfills; and how a new generation of activists is seeking for cultural preservation (the mayhem of Mardi Gras) and ecological sustainability. Both book and film are alluring. They draw the reader into a personal encounter with the experiences, the processes and quandaries of globalization, and has much to say about the kinds of people we are becoming. As if that isnt enough, Redmon concludes with a detailed and very useful guide to ethnographic filmmaking that should open the door for a new generation of sociological moviemakers. Quite simply, Beads, Bodies and Trash is the best single introduction to building a more visual (and sensually attuned) social science that has been written in decades.

John Grady, Sociology, Wheaton College

Innovative Ethnographies

Series Editor: Phillip Vannini, Royal Roads University

The purpose of this series is to use the new digital technology to capture a richer, more multidimensional view of social life than was otherwise done in the classic, print tradition of ethnography, while maintaining the traditional strengths of classic, ethnographic analysis.

Beads, Bodies, and Trash

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

David Redmon

First published 2015
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

2015 Taylor & Francis

The right of David Redmon to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Redmon, David.
Beads, bodies, and trash : public sex, global labor, and the disposability of Mardi Gras/David Redmon.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Division of labor. 2. Imports. 3. Exploitation. 4. Globalization. I. Title.

ISBN: 9780415525398 (hbk)
ISBN: 9780415525404 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781315764047 (ebk)

Typeset in Caslon, Copperplate, and Trade Gothic
by Swales and Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK

Special thanks to Caitlin Keenan for painstakingly reviewing, editing, and critiquing this manuscript twice. Thanks to Ashley Sabin for your ten years of patience as I wrote this book. Thanks to Magnolia Sabin Redmon who was born near the completion of this book.

Thank you Routledge Press and Innovative Ethnographies for the opportunity to publish with youespecially Phillip Vannini and Samantha Barbaro.

Thank you: Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard University; Film Studies Center, Harvard University; Sundance Film Festival; Phillip Vaninni; John Lasser; Deborah Smith; Dale Smith; Texas State University; Zac Early and Rebecca Dingo, Columbia, MO; True/False Film Festival; Becky McGill; Chandler Smith and Eric Taxier; Ben Fowlie; Camden Film Festival; Anna Lee-Popham; Jeff Silva; Anna-Liisa Aunio; John Faithful Hamer; Kristen Ghodsee; Hunter Snyder; Wesley Shrum; Gloria Fisk; Jed Bayer; Carol Thompson; Jeff Ferrell; Richard Lachmann; Jon Grady; Beverly Thompson; Mohmoud Sadri; Jim Williams; Tommy and Vicki Redmon; Dirk and Randy Sabin; Mark Horowitz; and the reviewers, Carol Rambo and Dennis Waskul, who repeatedly provided stringent critiques.