American Disgust
Racism, Microbial Medicine, and the Colony Within
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer shows how engaging with disgust—personally, politically, and theoretically—opens possibilities for conceptualizing health at the individual, societal, and planetary levels. Demonstrating how disgust is a changing, yet fundamental, aspect of American subjectivity, he highlights how cultural experiences of digestion, excrement, and disgust are inextricably tied to the creation of whiteness.
Stealthily, Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer preys on his readers’ own fascination with abject substances to draw us into a conceptually complex rendering of previously unexplored connections between disgust, racialization, and microbial processes and substances. Grounded in wide-ranging examples, drawn from both experience and key texts, the result is riveting.
Julie Guthman, author of The Problem with Solutions: Why Silicon Valley Can't Hack the Future of Food
American Disgust shows how perceptions of disgust and fears of contamination are rooted in the country’s history of colonialism and racism. Drawing on colonial, corporate, and medical archives, Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer argues that microbial medicine is closely entwined with changing cultural experiences of digestion, excrement, and disgust that are inextricably tied to the creation of whiteness.
Ranging from nineteenth-century colonial encounters with Native people to John Harvey Kellogg’s ideas around civilization and bowel movements to mid-twentieth-century diet and parenting advice books, Wolf-Meyer analyzes how embedded racist histories of digestion and disgust permeate contemporary debates around fecal microbial transplants and other bacteriotherapeutic treatments for gastrointestinal disease.
At its core, American Disgust wrestles with how changing cultural notions of digestion—what goes into the body and what comes out of it—create and impose racial categories motivated by feelings of disgust rooted in American settler-colonial racism. It shows how disgust is a changing, yet fundamental, aspect of American subjectivity and that engaging with it—personally, politically, and theoretically—opens up possibilities for conceptualizing health at the individual, societal, and planetary levels.
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Stealthily, Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer preys on his readers’ own fascination with abject substances to draw us into a conceptually complex rendering of previously unexplored connections between disgust, racialization, and microbial processes and substances. Grounded in wide-ranging examples, drawn from both experience and key texts, the result is riveting.
Julie Guthman, author of The Problem with Solutions: Why Silicon Valley Can't Hack the Future of Food
American Disgust pushes readers to think beyond individual taste to consider how whiteness shapes what is acceptable or profane and how to grow our capacity for the unfamiliar. It is a refreshing take on a long-debated concept.
Ashanté M. Reese, coeditor of Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice
Contents
Preface: The Colonial Multitude
Introduction: Getting Under the Surface
Part I. Genealogies of American Disgust
1. The Excremental: Sympathetic Magic and the Unsympathetic Medicine of Settler Colonialism
Threshold 1. Porous Bodies
2. The Rise of the American Diet: The Savage Within and the Regulation of Whiteness
3. Cultivating the Taste for Whiteness: Yogurt, Adulteration, and Eugenic Thinking
Threshold 2. Tasting Whiteness
4. The Arbitrary Rules of Disgust: Intimacy and Toilet Training
Part II. Disgust as Medicine
5. Normal, Regular, Standard: The Colonization of the Body through Fecal Microbial Transplants
Threshold 3. Desperation on the Cusp of Disgust
6. Being Gutless: Race, Kinship, and Microbial Medicine
7. Planetary Health, Scalar Bodies, and the Impossible Turn to Microbial Medicine
Acknowledgments
Notes
