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Scarcity and risk: The indoor ecologies of 'Hoarders'
Henderson, Hazlett
Henderson, Hazlett
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Abstract
Accumulation dynamics under racial colonial capitalism have produced a variety of structurally undervalued geographies of waste, pollution, and toxicity. While certain environments under capitalism are marked by scarcity and precarity, geographies of waste are, in contrast, rife with excess, abundance, and too much matter—of the wrong kind. Industrial manufacturing, the absorption of capitalist accumulation, and the unstable designation of waste come together in the home, a key site where agents negotiate the pressures of individualistic scarcity/precarity discourse and the risks posed by excessive matter in space.
In this paper, I interrogate the above tensions by analyzing a series of episodes from the A&E documentary television series Hoarders (2009-2013). Hoarders, along with a coterie of similar documentary series, occupies a complicated position in which a purportedly humanitarian impulse vies with the exploitative trappings of reality television. In each episode, cleaning and organization specialists work to purify and correct the behavior of one or two featured inhabitants of hoarded homes, primarily single-family houses in which residents store food items, consumer goods, and, sometimes, domesticated animals, the amount and condition of which is portrayed as excessive, hazardous, and wasteful. Particularly in the episodes which feature ‘hoarded animals,’ these indoor ecologies exemplify both a psychological alienation, the roots of which arguably lie in capitalist practice, and the reproduction of classed, raced notions of cleanliness, propriety, and purity. With a focus on the subjectivities of hoarded animals, I attempt here to advance understanding of scarcity/abundance discourse and practice under racial colonial capitalism.
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These are the slides from a presentation given at American Association of Geographers' Annual Meeting 2025 on 03/27/2025.
Date
2025-03-27
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University of Kansas
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HendersonH_2025.pdf
Adobe PDF, 21.41 MB
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Keywords
waste, accumulation, capitalism, hoarders, television