Dissident Gut: Technologies of Regularity, Politics of Revolt

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.

Jean Walton is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Rhode Island. Her previous books include Mudflat Dreaming: Waterfront Battles and the Squatters Who Fought Them in 1970s Vancouver (2018); Buffalo Trace: A Threefold Vibration, co-authored with Mary Cappello and James Morrison (2018); and Fair Sex, Savage Dreams: Race, Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference (2001).