The Anatomy of DisgustWilliam Miller embarks on an alluring journey into the world of disgust, showing how it brings order and meaning to our lives even as it horrifies and revolts us. Our notion of the self, intimately dependent as it is on our response to the excretions and secretions of our bodies, depends on it. Cultural identities have frequent recourse to its boundary-policing powers. Love depends on overcoming it, while the pleasure of sex comes in large measure from the titillating violation of disgust prohibitions. Imagine aesthetics without disgust for tastelessness and vulgarity; imagine morality without disgust for evil, hypocrisy, stupidity, and cruelty. Miller details our anxious relation to basic life processes: eating, excreting, fornicating, decaying, and dying. But disgust pushes beyond the flesh to vivify the larger social order with the idiom it commandeers from the sights, smells, tastes, feels, and sounds of fleshly physicality. Disgust and contempt, Miller argues, play crucial political roles in creating and maintaining social hierarchy. Democracy depends less on respect for persons than on an equal distribution of contempt. Disgust, however, signals dangerous division. The high's belief that the low actually smell bad, or are sources of pollution, seriously threatens democracy. Miller argues that disgust is deeply grounded in our ambivalence to life: it distresses us that the fair is so fragile, so easily reduced to foulness, and that the foul may seem more than passing fair in certain slants of light. When we are disgusted, we are attempting to set bounds, to keep chaos at bay. Of course we fail. But, as Miller points out, our failure is hardly an occasion for despair, for disgust also helps to animate the world, and to make it a dangerous, magical, and exciting place. |
Contents
1 | |
2 DISGUST AND ITS NEIGHBORS | 24 |
3 THICK GREASY LIFE | 38 |
4 THE SENSES | 60 |
5 ORIFICES AND BODILY WASTES | 89 |
6 FAIR IS FOUL AND FOUL IS FAIR | 109 |
7 WARRIORS SAINTS AND DELICACY | 143 |
8 THE MORAL LIFE OF DISGUST | 179 |
9 MUTUAL CONTEMPT AND DEMOCRACY | 206 |
10 ORWELLS SENSE OF SMELL | 235 |
NOTES | 257 |
WORKS CITED | 300 |
INDEX | 314 |
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Common terms and phrases
animals anus aversion behavior bodily body Brookers capacity century Chapter Christian civilizing process claim contaminating coprophagia culture dangerous defecation degradation desire disattendable discussion domain drinking earwax eating elicit disgust emotions excrement fastidious fear feces feel female feminized folk psychology foul Freud Freudian Gerald of Wales grotesque body guilt gusting hair Hobbesian horror human humiliation hypocrisy images indignation indulgence Jews judgment kind lepers less loathing loathsome look male matter means menstruation misogyny moral menials moral sentiments mouth nausea norms nose notion object odors offense olfaction one's organic orifices Orwell passions person pleasure political polluting psychological purity rank reaction formation Revenger's Tragedy revulsion role Rozin Schadenfreude seems semen sensation sense sexual shame simply skin skyr slimy smell social stench style substances suggests surfeit taste theory things touch ugly uncanny University Press upward contempt vagina vice violation virtue vulgar women word