This edited volume traces cultural appearances of disgust and investigates the varied forms and functions disgust takes and is given in both established and vernacular cultural practices.
Contributors focus on the socio-cultural creation, consumption, reception, and experience of disgust, a visceral emotion whose cultural situatedness and circulation has historically been overlooked in academic scholarship. Chapters challenge and supplement the biological understanding of disgust as a danger reaction and as a base emotion evoked by the lower senses, touch, taste and smell, through a wealth of original case studies in which disgust is analyzed in its aesthetic qualities, and in its cultural and artistic appearances and uses, featuring visual and aural media.
Because it is interdisciplinary, the book will be of interest to scholars in a wide range of fields, including visual studies, philosophy, aesthetics, sociology, history, literature, and musicology.
Author(s): Max Ryynänen, Heidi Kosonen, Susanne Ylönen
Series: Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 242
City: New York
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 From Visceral to the Aesthetic: Tracing Disgust in Contemporary Culture
Section I Aesthetic Approaches to Disgust
2 Overcoming Disgust: Why, When, and Whether
3 The Affective Nature of Horror
4 Illustrating Disgust as an Aesthetic Sentiment: Bharata’s Nāṭyaśāstra and Abhinavagupta’s Abhinavabhāratī
Section II Disgust and Othering
5 “Childish, Self-Centered, and Cruel”: Classed Disgust, Maternal Complaint, and Mediated Morality in an Anonymous Online Discussion Board
6 Performing Disgust: Affective Intersections of Misogyny, Racism, and Homophobia in Radical-Right Online Discussion
7 The Yuck Factor: Reiterating Insect-Eating (and Otherness) Through Disgust
Section III Foodways and Disgust
8 Disgust by Association: Date Labelling, Standardization, and Freshness
9 “We Did Not Shrink from Eating Carrion”: Food Disgust and Early Soviet Famines
10 Cannibals and Kin: Escaping the Disgusting in Newfoundland Fairy Tales
Section IV Engaging with Disgust in Music and Visual Culture
11 “The Kind of Music that Makes My Skin Crawl”: Disgust Associated with Musical Experiences
12 Music to Vomit to: The Dubstep Drop, the Bass Face, and the Sound of the Social Web
13 Generative Disgust, Aesthetic Engagement, and Community
Section V Disgust, Laughter, and Pleasure
14 Producing Disgust: Profanation, the Carnivalesque, and Queering as Keys for Understanding the Unsettling Pop Cultural Performance of Die Antwoord
15 Mortal Bodies, Disgust, and Affective Incongruity in Stand-Up Comedy
16 A Cultural Approach to Sex-Related Disgust: Rethinking Shunga and Other “Perversions” in the 21st Century
Index
