The Afterlives of Condoms
Clara Alexandra Beccaro
Condoms are rubbery. They are made out of latex (for the most part) and are generally pre-lubricated. Hence their stickiness. While they have existed since the pre-Renaissance era, the condoms we are familiar with—unwrap, pinch, roll—came to life in the 20th century. With a boom in worldwide sales, condoms became the means to pleasure without reproduction (Collier 2007:371). But in the 1990s, at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, condoms acquired a new meaning. The modes of transmission for the virus were (and still are) multiple, but unprotected—or what was very rapidly marked as, “unsafe” (queer)—sex became the main culprit. Paradoxically, condoms, which had precendently been the means to not create life, then became “lifesavers”.
In a commodity both sold and given freely, meshed in corporate and philanthropic business, the production of life became the outcome of a material designed to ensure that life would never be produced (98% of the time).
Pre-opening, condoms are fun. Packaged in a shiny little square, colorful, a metonymy of desire.
In its discarded state, the condom, however, is morphed into disgust.
Precedently a “lifesaver”, it now contains what could have been “contagious”, “life threatening”. A condom that leaks is a menace to the biopolitics of the body (the healthy body, the body of the state, the cisgender body, the white body, the innocent body). “All systems must rid themselves of things. If they don’t discard, those systems face existential threats to their continuation”. (Lepawsky 2019:1). Beyond avoiding pregnancy, the operative logic of the condom is to prevent contamination. In its discursive forms, the condom keeps hailing at notions of safety and livelihood. “Stay alive, Stay safe”.
But what is the afterlife of a condom?
On the rims of the Linh Dam Lak lake in Hanoi, Vietnam, used condoms accumulate in masses. (“Sea of Used Condoms” – VnExpress International” 2013).
The cluster of latex suffocates aquatic life; condoms are neither reusable nor biodegradable, but they float—not unlike dead fish. “Waste ‘is not a transhistorical given, either in form or content; rather, it is a mobile description of that which has been cast out or judged superfluous in a particular space–time” (Millington 2019:1044). The paratexts of condoms are well-known: store in a cool place; put condom on before sex; change every time you have sex.
Yet major condom brands fail to provide instructions on how or where to discard condoms. With 5 billion sold every year, wastelands of rubbered textile have emerged in Vietnam, New Jersey, or in Rio de Janeiro. All sites have become the landscapes that trace the itinerary of sexual intercourse’s surplus.
At the onset of the HIV/AIDS crisis, President Ronald Reagan allied with anti-condoms advocates. The disease, afterall, was a Gay-related Immune Deficiency (GRID, in its original name); queer bodies were just getting what they deserved (a slow, painful death). Despite those efforts, condom use successfully manifested itself in the mainstream. The lasting residue of stigma attached to condoms, nonetheless, remains a consequence of its association to gay (anal) sex. In its soiled state, the condom embodies a reminder that—just like queer bodies before you—sex could be responsible for your undoing.
“Disgust shapes the bodies of a community of the disgusted through how it sticks objects together”, writes Sara Ahmed (2004:15). The aversion towards condoms in their used state, then, is perhaps an extension of the disgust that has been directed towards the infected queer body. To consider the ways of knowing embodied by the condom demands an exploration of its production as a solution to the HIV virus and a barrier from those that carry it. Its epistemology is not only laced in pleasure and desire, but also tangled with state-sanctioned disposability of certain bodies.
In their post-mortem condition, those who died of HIV were refused funeral practices and burial grounds. Abandoned by their relatives, they (too) were discarded in mass graves—without “pride or dignity” (“Abject | Definition” n.d.). “The abject, however, is not a particular, definable object. Something becomes abject only by virtue of being rejected and expelled in the effort to establish the self” (Millar, 2018:56). The political application of condoms is iterative. It strives to stretch bodies towards health and safety, far away from disease and the potential waste they conjure. In 2012, students Western Washington state were “distributed 55,000 condoms with QR codes”. (Dybuncio n.d:1).) Condom users could then “scan these codes […] after using protection”, allowing for a cartographic landscape of safe sex to emerge.
If the map reveals endorsed and responsible sexual behavior, it obscures the carcass of used condoms and the leftovers of its afterlives. Eight years later, the hosting website, www.wheredidyouwearit.com, is no longer accessible. Another mass in the digital landfill.
The Hart Island Project has, since 2014, sought to identify the bodies of people who died of AIDS in the 1980s. Bodies buried anonymously. Can those marked as waste ever be (re)traced?
Bibliography
“Abject | Definition of Abject by Lexico.” n.d. Lexico Dictionaries | English. Accessed February 25, 2020.
Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge.
Collier, Aine. 2007. The Humble Little Condom: A History. Prometheus Books.
Dybuncio, Monica. n.d. “Condoms with QR Codes Enable Smartphone Check-Ins.” May 1, 2012.
Lepawsky, Josh. 2019. “No Insides on the Outsides.” Discard Studies. September 23, 2019.
Millar, Kathleen M. 2018. Reclaiming the Discarded: Life and Labor on Rio’s Garbage Dump. Durham London: Duke University Press.
Millington, Nate, and Mary Lawhon. 2019. “Geographies of Waste: Conceptual Vectors from the Global South.” Progress in Human Geography 43 (6): 1044–63.
“Sea of Used Condoms, Tampons Wash up in Hanoi Lake – VnExpress International.” Nov 23, 2016.
“The Hart Island Project.” n.d. https://www.hartisland.net/.