Dissident Gut: Technologies of Regularity, Politics of Revolt (Gender and the Body in Literature and Culture)

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. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Contents Acknowledgements Series Preface 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 Index