Questions this week: What’s more ‘natural’ than expelling shit, our body’s waste? Has this substance always been seen as waste? What can examining the political histories of our shit removal infrastructures tell us about common assumptions around cleanliness, poverty and wealth, and race? Is our disgust around shit, and the speed we try to get it away from us, akin to trash, or are there important differences? How has shit been made both an individual and public problem? What are the links between this domestication and fundamental State infrastructures? What are parallels with how modernity has treated shit, and the words we use to describe it and other waste products, attempting to ‘cleanse’ our language?
Readings:
- Pliny, The Natural History, Book XXVIII, Chapters 13, 18.
- Gerling, Daniel Max. “Excrementalisms: Revaluing What We Have Only Ever Known as Waste.” Food, Culture & Society 22, no. 5 (2019): 622–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/15528014.2019.1638126.
- Simmons, Dana. “Waste Not, Want Not: Excrement and Economy in Nineteenth-Century France.” Representations 96, no. 1 (November 1, 2006): 73–98. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2006.96.1.73.
- Laporte, Dominique. History of Shit. Translated by Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe el-Khoury. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. (read 26-75)