Examining the racial underpinnings of food, microbial medicine, and disgust in America

 

American Disgust shows how perceptions of disgust and fears of contamination are rooted in the country’s history of colonialism and racism. Drawing on colonial, corporate, and medical archives, Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer argues that microbial medicine is closely entwined with changing cultural experiences of digestion, excrement, and disgust that are inextricably tied to the creation of whiteness. 

 

Ranging from nineteenth-century colonial encounters with Native people to John Harvey Kellogg’s ideas around civilization and bowel movements to mid-twentieth-century diet and parenting advice books, Wolf-Meyer analyzes how embedded racist histories of digestion and disgust permeate contemporary debates around fecal microbial transplants and other bacteriotherapeutic treatments for gastrointestinal disease.

 

At its core, American Disgust wrestles with how changing cultural notions of digestion—what goes into the body and what comes out of it—create and impose racial categories motivated by feelings of disgust rooted in American settler-colonial racism. It shows how disgust is a changing, yet fundamental, aspect of American subjectivity and that engaging with it—personally, politically, and theoretically—opens up possibilities for conceptualizing health at the individual, societal, and planetary levels.

A major new reading of a U.S. public health system shaped by fraught perceptions of culture, race, and criminality

At the heart of Archiving Medical Violence is an interrogation of the notions of national and scientific progress, marking an advance in scholarship that shows how such violence is both an engine of medical progress and, more broadly, the production of empire. It reads the medical archive through a lens that centers how it is produced, remembered, and contested within cultural production and critical memory.

 

In this innovative and interdisciplinary book, Christopher Perreira argues that it is in the contradictions of settler colonialism and racial capitalism that we find how medical violence is narrated as a public good. He presents case studies from across a range of locations—Hawai‘i, California, Louisiana, Guatemala—and historical periods from the nineteenth century on. Examining national and scientific conceptions of progress through the lens of medicine and public health, he places official archives in dialogue with visual and literary works, patient writing, and more. 

 

Archiving Medical Violence explores the contested public terrains for narrating value and vulnerabilities, bodies and geographical locations. Ultimately, Perreira reveals for us a medical imaginary built on racialized criminality driving contemporary politics of citizenship, memory, and identity.

 

 

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In Body Problems, M. Wolff offers groundbreaking insight into Sally Gross, a South African intersex priest and activist whose body was continuously policed and politicized. Gross’s role in founding Intersex South Africa and her involvement with the African National Congress are celebrated in the Apartheid Museum, but the complex dimensions of her life—from her Jewish heritage to her Christian priesthood and Buddhist practices—remain largely unexplored. Wolff illuminates these lesser-known aspects of Gross’s spirituality and theorizes her resistance to the regulation of intersexuality. The book urges readers to rethink bodies and belonging, particularly as they relate to formations of gender and religion. Wolff presents Gross’s life as a guide for discerning our commitments to social justice and responsible relations. Body Problems is a timely and expansive contribution to ongoing discourses on the medical, religious, and political construction of bodies.

Explores the minute interactions between military servicemen and medical caregivers during World War I to tell a broader story about race, colonialism, labor, and global health.
 
Disabled Empire examines how imperial precedents and racial ideologies shaped the medical treatments that the British state offered to several million Black and brown servicemen during World War I. In recovering the voices and experiences of these soldiers, Hilary R. Buxton illustrates how they navigated the institutional culture of the imperial military and how they helped to shape health and welfare systems well beyond the interwar period.
 
The Great War was the first time that troops and volunteers from nearly all reaches of the Empire participated in the war effort side-by-side. Despite official attempts at segregation, colonial troops met in trenches, mobile camps, casualty clearing stations, hospital ships, and convalescent homes. Just as importantly, those organizing treatment encountered men of different ethnicities, religions, and cultures from across and beyond the British Empire. For British officials, this moment offered an opportunity to remake colonial efficiency and medical knowledge. Yet, as Buxton shows, colonial servicemen were not passive subjects in a wartime laboratory: they were vocal participants who demanded a say in the therapies prescribed to them, the rations they required, the psychiatric care they received, and the prosthetics with which they were fitted. Together, these encounters profoundly remade colonial relations, reshaping imperial science, administration, and colonial understandings of subjecthood.
 
Disabled Empire pushes literature on the war and medicine outside its national, Eurocentric focus to confront the colonial logic of global health inequity.

Since the 1600s, travelers, scientists, and doctors have claimed that “hermaphroditism” and intersex are disproportionately common among black South Africans. In Envisioning African Intersex Amanda Lock Swarr debunks this claim by interrogating contemporary intersex medicine and demonstrating its indivisibility from colonial ideologies and scientific racism. Tracing the history of racialized research that underpins medical and scientific premises of gendered bodies, Swarr analyzes decolonial actions by intersex South Africans from the 1990s to the present, centering the work of organizers such as Sally Gross, the first openly intersex activist in Africa and a global pioneer of intersex legislation. Swarr also explores African social media activism that advocates for intersex justice and challenges the mistreatment of South African Olympian Caster Semenya. Throughout, Swarr shows how activists displace doctors’ impositions to fashion self-representation. By unseating colonial visions of gender, intersex South Africans are actively disrupting medical violence, decolonizing gender binaries, and inciting policy changes.

All author royalties from Envisioning African Intersex will be donated to Intersex South Africa.

Explores the course of development of German seroanthropology from its origins in World War I until the end of the Third Reich. Gives an all encompassing interpretation of how the discovery of blood groups in around 1900 galvanised not only old mythologies of blood and origin but also new developments in anthropology and eugenics in the 1920s and 1930s. Boaz portrays how the personal motivations of blood scientists influenced their professional research, ultimately demonstrating how conceptually indeterminate and politically volatile the science of race was under the Nazi regime.