Riff Raff Book reading: RUMBLES: A CURIOUS HISTORY OF THE GUT

Belly up to the Bar, take a seat, and join in some peristaltic perambulations with authors, Elsa Richardson’s and Jean Walton!  Don’t miss this conversation on the history and politics of the stomach, the bowels, or in other words, our “SECOND BRAINS”

Elsa Richardson’s Rumbles unearths the beguiling—and often secret—history of the body’s most fascinating system: the gut. The stomach is notoriously outspoken. It growls, gurgles, and grumbles while other organs remain silent, inconspicuous, and content. For centuries humans have puzzled over this rowdy, often overzealous organ, deliberating on the extent of its influence over cognition, mental well-being, and emotions, and wondering how the gut became so central to our sense of self. Engaging, eye-opening, and thought-provoking, Rumbles leaves no stone unturned, scrutinizing religious tracts and etiquette guides, satirical cartoons, and political pamphlets, in its quest to answer the millennia-old question: Are we really ruled by our stomachs?

Jean Walton’s Dissident Gut poses social, psychoanalytic, and political questions about how we manage the world through our peristaltic systems, as we eat and excrete. What does Marx say about how we “mediate, regulate, and control” our metabolic relation to nature (and about the “metabolic rift” that is destroying it)? What is our “fecal habitus”—or how we deploy our bowel habits to assert social distinctions based on class, race, and gender? Why is it always women who manage the household waste, training its infants to defecate to a schedule, and cleaning up everyone’s shit? Does a metabolic politics of transformation move from the dissident gut outwards into every social, political and global domain?