Gut Feminism
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Abstract
The connections between gut and depression have been known, in the West, since ancient Greece.It was the Hippocratic writers who gave the name melancholia to states of dejection, hopelessness, and torpor.They understood such states to be caused by an accumulation of black bile (in Greek, melaina chole), a substance secreted by the liver.For these writers, and for prac ti tion ers of medicine for another two thousand years, melancholia was both the name of one of the enteric humors and the name for a disruption to emotional equilibrium (Jackson 1986).One of the Hippocratic aphorisms makes the affinity between these two modes of melancholia explicit: "The bowel should be treated in melancholics" (Hippocrates 1978, 217).The condensation of viscera and mood, exemplified in the term melancholia, is the subject of Gut Feminism.This book will explore the alliances of internal organs and minded states, not in relation to ancient texts but in the contemporary milieu where melancholias are or ga nized as entanglements of affects, ideations, nerves, agitation, sociality, pills, and synaptic biochemistry.I am not proposing a theory of depression.Rather, I want to extract from these analyses of depressed viscera and mood some gain for feminist theory.I have two ambitions.First, I seek some feminist theoretical gain in relation to how biological data can be used to think about minded and bodily states.What conceptual innovations would be possible if feminist theory wasn't so instinctively antibiological?Second, I seek some feminist theoretical gain in relation to thinking about the hostility (bile) intrinsic to our politics.What if feminist politics are necessarily more destructive than we are able to bear?This introduction