West Textures: Aesthetics and Extraction in Texas

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Religious Studies

First Advisor

Lofton, Kathryn

Abstract

West Textures: Aesthetics and Extraction in Texas is grounded in the arid terrain and towns of western Texas. This geographical siting is simultaneously attuned to various global and celestial movements of people, ideas, and matter. Informed by two years of fieldwork in Texas’s Chihuahuan Desert, I theorize the impact that elemental materials—oil, water, air, and earth—have on the region’s Indigenous and colonial societies. Through these core elements, the geographies, beliefs, and economies of West Texas took shape. The first chapter follows the extractive techniques and geological formations of petroleum in Texas, rethinking modern valuations of surface, depth, and interiority. My second chapter brings queer theory to bear on Texas groundwater law and hydrogeology, tracing the diverse, often conflicting, possibilities provided by the (meta)physical contours of fluidity in legal records, ecological changes, and spiritual practices. My third chapter considers historical and contemporary deployments of emptiness within Texas’s Chihuahuan Desert and the ways air mediates feelings of immediacy, danger, and authenticity. West Textures pushes against arguments that have been forwarded by some eco-theologians and new materialist scholars and argues that, far from needing to be saved from the status of inert matter through the activation of agency, these materials have conditioned the methods of critical thought. West Textures analyzes three different techniques of value production: depth, mystery, and immediacy. I argue that fossil fuel extraction created the conditions through which Anglo-Protestant colonial regimes valorized and privatized elemental materials. These religio-racial value systems harnessed the particular properties of hydrocarbons. New and developing techniques of excavation bolstered philosophical, theological, and methodological perspectives that prioritized depth, mystery, and immediacy as the texture of truth. Bringing Indigenous and feminist science and technology studies, as well as Black and Queer theories of negativity, to bear on histories of settler colonialism, my project demonstrates that extraction requires a sharpening of attention and a deepening of the relationship with the microbes and minerals that fuel our uneven world.

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