Dissident Gut

Dissident Gut’s major strength lies in how precisely it braids Marxist ecology, feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and medical history through the aperture of peristalsis. Its formal alteration between conceptual “macro” and detailed “micro” chapters exemplifies how theory and embodied practice must be read together. Her prose is lucid and balances analytic distance with respect for her subjects’ bodily experiences. [...] Dissident Gut is an original and methodologically-generative contribution to environmental humanities, feminist theory, and critical theory. -- Sriyanka Basak * E3W: Ethnic and Third World Literatures *
In moments of political pressure—colonial rule, incarceration, and border regimes—the body does not remain neutral. It reacts; it withholds, expels, and emphatically revolts. In Dissident Gut, Jean Walton takes this bodily dissent as her object of study, arguing that digestion itself is inherently a political process. […] As a whole, Dissident Gut is a fundamentally and brilliantly unsettling book. -- Trisha D. Gupta * Synapsis *
A remarkable achievement of theoretical and archival rigour, this book changes how we understand the gendered regulation of bodies in the early twentieth century, fundamentally refiguring our sense of the biopolitical. -- Karl Schoonover, University of Warwick
Encyclopaedically digesting medical historical, literary, psychoanalytic, social theoretical, economic and political materials, Walton offers a wonderfully rich and nourishing theory of metabolic processes, both within and beyond the human gut. Through brilliant close readings and careful broader conceptual work, Dissident Gut tracks the compelling ins and outs of the faecal biopolitics that run through modernity’s management of time and space. -- Laura Salisbury, University of Exeter