Wet dreams : eco-subjectivity, mineral washing, and the cultural politics of electric mobility

This article offers a conjunctural analysis of electric vehicle (EV) culture as a site where environmental crisis, geopolitical extraction, technological nationalism, and cultural aspiration intersect. Focusing on Australia and China, we trace how automobility is being reimagined through ecological imperatives, industrial ambitions, and affective narratives. From outback fantasies in Australian motoring to China’s innovation-driven campaigns, EV transitions expose the deranged temporalities of the Anthropocene, where geological, industrial, and consumer timescales collapse. We explore what we term ‘wet dreams’ of sustainable mobility—ocean-themed imaginaries found in Chinese EV marketing (e.g., BYD’s “Build Your Dreams”) that promise blue futures while embodying the extractive logics of battery supply chains. To describe this, we propose the concept of ‘mineral washing’: the strategic obscuring of labour exploitation, ecological degradation, and speculative hydro-mining behind narratives of green mobility. Drawing on cultural politics and the eco-humanities, we argue that EVs function not just as technological artefacts but as cultural technologies that reproduce extractivist desires. Far from signaling a clean break from fossil capitalism, the EV revolution in China and Australia reveals uneven sustainability transitions shaped by aqua-geopolitics, cultural imaginaries, and more-than-human entanglements.