The Queer Politics of Filth and Humility

In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Oscar Wilde links the degradation of physical beauty to the morality of a cursed portrait’s sitter.¹ 1 - Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray [1890] (London: Arcturus Publishing Ltd., 2009), 120. It’s an age-old idea that pleasing appearances, pale flesh, and a blemish-free facade correspond with good nature and virtuous behaviour within. The French director Coralie Fargeat updates similar themes in her critically acclaimed body horror film The Substance (2024), a feminist take on aging, vanity, and the vapid nature of celebrity culture. The artists Neal Auch and Alex Turgeon both employ the concept of decay, and its aesthetics and associated philosophical underpinnings, as a queering tool to critique notions such as consumption and capitalism. Through hedonistic pleasure and a discerning critique of gentrification, respectively, they offer a space rife for interrogating these ideas, using filth and the derelict to explore destruction and disintegration in ways that speak to a queer sensitivity and counter normativity, material idolatry, and mass consumption. A queer politics of decay contains lessons for finding beauty in the rundown, animating the abandoned, and making life out of loss. Most importantly, it teaches us to hold on to our communities and relations rather than material goods.