In the first meeting of the “Waste & Body” series we will host medical anthropologist Matthew Wolf-Meyer (Binghamton University & Tampere University), who will present a precirculate book chapter, titled “The Insides Outside, Or, Cultivating Disgust with Baby Food and Toilet Training.

Disgust is often cast as a "primordial emotion," a base instinct that humans exhibit as a protective measure against dangerou substances. But disgust responses vary between societies and between people; accounting for this difference points to how disgust is cultivated as an embodied practice. "The Insides Outside" focuses on parenting guides and how they aim to shape parents' cultivation of their children's disqust responses, both to the kinds of food they eat and the substances they excrete. In shaping children's responses, parents-and parenting guides-help concretize American attitudes toward bodies, their substances, and physiological processes, all of which are haunted by ideas about temporal "regularity" and bodily normalcy.

This is a hybrid event. Read contact and registration for more.