American disgust : racism, microbial medicine, and the colony within / Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wolf-Meyer, Matthew J., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Gastrointestinal system--Microbiology.

Gastrointestinal system.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (294 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press, [2024]

Summary:

"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. "-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Contents

Preface: The Colonial Multitude

Introduction: Getting Under the Surface

Part I. Genealogies of American Disgust

Chapter 1. The Excremental: Sympathetic Magic and the Unsympathetic Medicine of Settler Colonialism

Threshold 1. Porous Bodies

Chapter 2. The Rise of the American Diet: The Savage Within and the Regulation of Whiteness

Chapter 3. Cultivating the Taste for Whiteness: Yogurt, Adulteration, and Eugenic Thinking

Threshold 2. Tasting Whiteness

Chapter 4. The Arbitrary Rules of Disgust: Intimacy and Toilet Training

Part II. Disgust as Medicine

Chapter 5. Normal, Regular, Standard: The Colonization of the Body through Fecal Microbial Transplants

Threshold 3. Desperation on the Cusp of Disgust

Chapter 6. Being Gutless: Race, Kinship, and Microbial Medicine

Chapter 7. Planetary Health, Scalar Bodies, and the Impossible Turn to Microbial Medicine

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Author Biography.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781452971056

1452971056

9781452971063

1452971064