Dissident Gut: Technologies of Regularity, Politics of Revolt

Document Type

Book

Date of Original Version

2024

Department

English

Abstract

Draws on theories of Marxism, feminism and the biopolitics of affect to investigate the psycho-dynamic properties of the modern peristaltic system

  • Brings Marxist environmental theory in conversation with sociological study of faecal habitus
  • Intervenes in discussions of biopolitics and “bare life” to emphasize metabolic aspects of citizenship
  • Interrogates the relation between feminized labour of waste management and women’s bodily habitus
  • Brings together diverse disciplinary approaches to the question of metabolic living in the early 20c Western world
  • Brings to light suffragettes’ influence on Gandhi’s concept of “satyagraha”
  • Opens and closes with present day instances of metabolic and faecal biopolitics in detention centres at U.S./Mexico border, in rural and urban India where open defecation is practiced, and in the U.S. rural south, where “flush and forget” faecal habitus is impossible for many

Explores the biopolitics of modern metabolism, of how humans manage the world through their peristaltic systems, as they ingest food and produce waste. Set against a backdrop of Marx’s theory of how we “mediate, regulate, and control” our metabolic relation to nature, of the rise of a bourgeois faecal habitus, of the relegation of domestic waste management to female “meta-industrial” workers, of depleted agricultural fields and polluted urban centres, Dissident Gut performs three in-depth case studies of early twentieth-century English and European women whose wayward intestinal systems intervene in larger social, affective, and political networks, and who assert a peristaltic grammar of desire and resistance. Intervenes in theoretical discussions around the gut-brain axis, biopolitics and biopower, materialist feminism, psychoanalysis and hysteria, bodily habitus, and waste management.

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