Dissident Gut - (Gender and the Body in Literature and Culture) by Jean Walton (Paperback)

About the Book

Draws on theories of Marxism, feminism and the biopolitics of affect to investigate the psycho-dynamic properties of the modern peristaltic system

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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 Exeter