What do you think?
Rate this book
American Disgust: Racism, Microbial Medicine, and the Colony Within
Examining the racial underpinnings of food, microbial medicine, and disgust in America
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.
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.
- GenresAudiobook
293 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 14, 2024
9 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
October 27, 2024
[Listened to Audiobook] If you read one book about human feces this year, read "The Devil's Elevent." If you choose to read two books about human feces, sure, read "American Disgust."
American Disgust contains some genuinely fascinating analysis of anthropological, historical, and contemporary digital sources. Ritual use of excrement by Indigenous people of the American Southwest. John Harvey Kellogg and his quest for health through digestive regularity. The parallel stories of how yogurt became part of the "Standard" American Diet while the Mediterranean, Middle-Eastern, and Caucasian (I use the term to refer to the specific geographic region) Immigrants assimilated in racial whiteness. A political critique of Robin Greenfield's blogging in of an Atlanta food desert. Online groups about Ellimination Communication and Fecal Microbial Transplant! Wow!
For the breadth of this work, sometimes the depth got lost on me; some of the deeper analysis reads like a PhD level philosophy paper. And there is an omission that I found deeply frustrating for a book interrogating how digestion relates to colonialism and whiteness in America. "How to Eat to Live," by Elijah Muhammad (where rules about diet and digestion are explicitly related to blackness) doesn't even get a mention in a footnote.
American Disgust contains some genuinely fascinating analysis of anthropological, historical, and contemporary digital sources. Ritual use of excrement by Indigenous people of the American Southwest. John Harvey Kellogg and his quest for health through digestive regularity. The parallel stories of how yogurt became part of the "Standard" American Diet while the Mediterranean, Middle-Eastern, and Caucasian (I use the term to refer to the specific geographic region) Immigrants assimilated in racial whiteness. A political critique of Robin Greenfield's blogging in of an Atlanta food desert. Online groups about Ellimination Communication and Fecal Microbial Transplant! Wow!
For the breadth of this work, sometimes the depth got lost on me; some of the deeper analysis reads like a PhD level philosophy paper. And there is an omission that I found deeply frustrating for a book interrogating how digestion relates to colonialism and whiteness in America. "How to Eat to Live," by Elijah Muhammad (where rules about diet and digestion are explicitly related to blackness) doesn't even get a mention in a footnote.
Displaying 1 of 1 review