The Materiality of Disgusting Things

• In Event: 348 - Section on Sociology of Culture Paper Session. The Materiality of Culture?

Abstract

In this paper I examine the materiality of disgust sites. I investigate from whence stems the material object’s power to repel, and how it performs its repelling. How does the material object become a disgust-site, and then how does it do its constituting and repelling? As material objects, disgusting things are theorized to be powerful, durable, and universal: They are powerful in that they command attention and a cautious orientation toward them; they cannot be ignored and they force people to react to them. They are durable in that the material objects that are considered disgusting today will likely be considered disgusting tomorrow, and those objects that are disgusting to one person in a cultural arena will likely be considered disgusting by most others in the culture. And they are universal, it is argued, in that every human culture has some form of disgust trigger and response. Disgusting objects, or ‘disgust-sites’ (my term), are also represented as operating in a pre-cognitive way; or as triggering a feeling of revulsion before a witness has fully interpreted or understood what is doing the provoking. If disgust-sites exert influence on social actors before the social actors’ have interpreted them, as the experience is typically represented in the disgust literature, then disgust-sites represent a powerful site for re-examining theories of materiality and meaning. Put another way, these characteristics make disgust-objects strategic research sites for theorizing materiality beyond the confines of cultural structuralism (Alexander 2008a, 2008b) and body-based materialism (Johnson 1987, 2007).

Author

• Jason L. Mast, University of Warwick