Dissident Gut
Technologies of Regularity, Politics of Revolt
Will be published approx. on 1. January 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
304 pages
978-1-3995-3293-8 (ISBN)
Description
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.
Reviews / Votes
A remarkable achievement of theoretical and archival rigour, this book changes how we understand the gendered regulation of bodies in the early twentieth century, fundamentally refiguring our sense of the biopolitical. -- Karl Schoonover, University of Warwick Encyclopaedically digesting medical historical, literary, psychoanalytic, social theoretical, economic and political materials, Walton offers a wonderfully rich and nourishing theory of metabolic processes, both within and beyond the human gut. Through brilliant close readings and careful broader conceptual work, Dissident Gut tracks the compelling ins and outs of the faecal biopolitics that run through modernity's management of time and space. -- Laura Salisbury, University of ExeterMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 157 mm
Width: 236 mm
Thickness: 21 mm
Weight
460 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-3995-3293-8 (9781399532938)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
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).
Content
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Biopolitics of Metabolic Disturbance
Part I: Macro-Peristalsis
1. Metabolic Rift and the Remedy of Faecal Recycling
2. Faecal Habitus
3. Marx's Regulation of Metabolism
4. The Second Brain
Part II: Micro-Peristalsis
5. Unkinking, Streamlining, and the Household Engineer
6. The Peristaltic Desiring-Machine of Miss Louise
7. The Creative Devolution of Reverse Peristalsis
8. Peristaltic Politics of a Suffragette
Conclusion: Faecal biopolitics in the twenty-first century
Bibliography
Notes
Index
Introduction: The Biopolitics of Metabolic Disturbance
Part I: Macro-Peristalsis
1. Metabolic Rift and the Remedy of Faecal Recycling
2. Faecal Habitus
3. Marx's Regulation of Metabolism
4. The Second Brain
Part II: Micro-Peristalsis
5. Unkinking, Streamlining, and the Household Engineer
6. The Peristaltic Desiring-Machine of Miss Louise
7. The Creative Devolution of Reverse Peristalsis
8. Peristaltic Politics of a Suffragette
Conclusion: Faecal biopolitics in the twenty-first century
Bibliography
Notes
Index