Configurations

abstract:

This essay focuses on the affect of disgust to explore how Sidney Whiting’s Memoirs of a Stomach parodies the centrality of the stomach in nineteenth-century sympathetic discourse. Whiting imagines disgust as an intersubjective exchange among Mr. Stomach, the body’s other organs, and the other objects, notably foodstuffs, that he encounters. Whiting frequently appropriates the language of political inclusion and exclusion to stage the narrator’s description of what he is forced to digest. Memoirs suggests that the body’s physiological and affective processes of ingestion and expulsion mirror ongoing national processes of assimilation and exclusion that determine how political subjects are made, which subjects get to be included and who remains outside these juridical categories despite being subject to the British Crown. Disgust in Memoirs uses physiological functions to figure the contradictions at work in increasingly complex social and political processes that determine who or what belongs—who or what can be “digested.”