Girlhood as Pedagogy: Mourning the Self and the Planet Through Junk Journaling in the Anthropocene

A modest piece of autobiography comprised of literal garbage, the junk journal represents a revisiting of one’s girlhood while equipped with the knowledge of the present, known in psychoanalysis as "aftering." The creation and the viewing of such a journal prompts the question: what gets tossed away when we do not attend to girlhood in the age of climate disaster? Revisiting and mourning girlhood in this manner supercharges one’s memory with a cross-species, cross-celestial solidarity with the planet itself, who also endures the type of extractive precarity experienced by the objectified body.