This article is part of the following series: Book forum
Elizabeth Wilson’s Gut Feminism revisits feminism’s traditionally antagonistic engagement with biology with a call to reposition the body in feminist thought. As Wilson critically explores relationships between guts and melancholia, pharmacokinetics and bile, psyche and soma, she generates tools and insights for a new feminist reading of biology, and articulates the role of aggression as a necessary condition for feminist …
How does one use a book? We are well trained in how to read a book. We know how to interpret, decipher or clarify the content of the pages we read. But what about a different kind of engagement with a book? One less immediately oriented toward the satisfactions of comprehension and discernment and more oriented to use.
I …
Where is the gut? A corporeal and metaphorical space, our gut is the suggestion of invisible viscera, our most sensitive internal self— soft and vulnerable, near the surface, and barely covered by muscle and skin. The gut is where the outside world comes in, and where the inside threatens to come out. Spill your guts. Gut idioms range from …
Dear Diary,
Everyone is sad, but it’s a strange kind of sad.
-Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder) in Heathers (1988)
Elizabeth Wilson’s Gut Feminism hovers on the challenge to “cultivate capacities to harm.” In this intricate book, Wilson explores what might happen if feminist theory consumed biology differently. Feminist theory must do so by “reading” biology through the apparatus of …
Have you ever held entrails in your hands? Like long sausages they slip and slide, warm, feeling strangely seductive yet evoking disgust. To feel the visceral insides of any body is strange (unless you are a butcher or surgeon). I’ve had Elizabeth Wilson’s book in my hand a few days now, thrown inside my bag and taken out later at …
Mid-way through the introduction to Gut Feminism, Elizabeth Wilson pauses to think about the literature on abdominal migraine, and the variously psychogenic and biochemical properties that have been thought to animate that experience. Against a clinical literature that insists on understanding abdominal migraine (an acute midline stomach pain, most common in children) as a cerebral migraine pushed to the periphery …