Books about Disgust from Amazon.com

Should laws about sex and pornography be based on social conventions about what is disgusting? Should felons be required to display bumper stickers or wear T-shirts that announce their crimes? This powerful and elegantly written book, by one of America's most influential philosophers, presents a critique of the role that shame and disgust play in our individual and social lives and, in particular, in the law.

Martha Nussbaum argues that we should be wary of these emotions because they are associated in troubling ways with a desire to hide from our humanity, embodying an unrealistic and sometimes pathological wish to be invulnerable. Nussbaum argues that the thought-content of disgust embodies "magical ideas of contamination, and impossible aspirations to purity that are just not in line with human life as we know it." She argues that disgust should never be the basis for criminalizing an act, or play either the aggravating or the mitigating role in criminal law it currently does. She writes that we should be similarly suspicious of what she calls "primitive shame," a shame "at the very fact of human imperfection," and she is harshly critical of the role that such shame plays in certain punishments.

Drawing on an extraordinarily rich variety of philosophical, psychological, and historical references--from Aristotle and Freud to Nazi ideas about purity--and on legal examples as diverse as the trials of Oscar Wilde and the Martha Stewart insider trading case, this is a major work of legal and moral philosophy.

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William Miller embarks on an alluring journey into the world of disgust, showing how it brings order and meaning to our lives even as it horrifies and revolts us. Our notion of the self, intimately dependent as it is on our response to the excretions and secretions of our bodies, depends on it. Cultural identities have frequent recourse to its boundary-policing powers. Love depends on overcoming it, while the pleasure of sex comes in large measure from the titillating violation of disgust prohibitions. Imagine aesthetics without disgust for tastelessness and vulgarity; imagine morality without disgust for evil, hypocrisy, stupidity, and cruelty.

Miller details our anxious relation to basic life processes: eating, excreting, fornicating, decaying, and dying. But disgust pushes beyond the flesh to vivify the larger social order with the idiom it commandeers from the sights, smells, tastes, feels, and sounds of fleshly physicality. Disgust and contempt, Miller argues, play crucial political roles in creating and maintaining social hierarchy. Democracy depends less on respect for persons than on an equal distribution of contempt. Disgust, however, signals dangerous division. The high's belief that the low actually smell bad, or are sources of pollution, seriously threatens democracy.

Miller argues that disgust is deeply grounded in our ambivalence to life: it distresses us that the fair is so fragile, so easily reduced to foulness, and that the foul may seem more than passing fair in certain slants of light. When we are disgusted, we are attempting to set bounds, to keep chaos at bay. Of course we fail. But, as Miller points out, our failure is hardly an occasion for despair, for disgust also helps to animate the world, and to make it a dangerous, magical, and exciting place.

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Erika Lopez's award-winning work has reams of racy, raunchy and riotously funny appeal for audiences spanning regular comic fans to Generation X-ers to the queer literary world. This collection of comic, hilariously incisive narratives--illustrated in Lopez's splashy, apropos style--runs riot with mainstream perceptions of "underground" lifestyles--and with just about anything else that crosses this artist's keen eye..
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In recent years there has been a surge of research on disgust and its relation to phobic avoidance This comprehensive volume provides the first, most extensive, up-to-date compilation of information available on this basic emotion.

Disgust and Its Disorders: Theory, Assessment, and Treatment Implications thoughtfully examines the role of disgust in psychopathology by highlighting important theoretical and methodological developments and discussing recent research on behavioral patterns that can be provoked by disgust. Contributors demonstrate that disgust plays an important role in a wide range of psychopathology, including sexual dysfunction, eating disorders, animal phobias, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Disgust is shown to be a multi-dimensional construct that centers on the unifying theme of potential contamination of the body, soul, and broad social order. Editors Olatunji and McKay thoroughly review the available research on disgust and shed light on how its interpretation will in turn facilitate the development of better treatment..
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"Alexandra Cuffel's bold study interprets the interreligious polemic of medieval Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the context of late antique disgust for the body, especially the female body, shared by all three traditions. This will be a very influential book for medievalists in many fields." --E. Ann Matter, University of Pennsylvania

"With Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic , Alexandra Cuffel has produced a remarkably original, ambitious, and important book that sets the agenda for future discussions." --Peter Biller, University of York

"'Filth,' 'putrid,' 'excrement,' 'foul,' 'bloody discharge,' 'stench',--as these and other terms of physical and moral revulsion unfold, Gendering Disgust grabs our attention and refuses to let go. Alexandra Cuffel offers her readers a riveting and enlightening comparative socioreligious study of the body's place in religious polemic from late antiquity and the early Middle Ages to the fourteenth century. It is a singularly engaging and disturbing study highlighting the polemical lexicon and registers shared by pagans, Jews, Christians, and Muslims." --Ross Brann, Cornell University

In Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic, Alexandra Cuffel analyzes medieval Jewish, Christian, and Muslim uses of gendered bodily imagery and metaphors of impurity in their visual and verbal polemic against one another. Drawing from a rich array of sources--including medical texts, bestiaries, midrash, biblical commentaries, kabbalistic literature, Hebrew liturgical poetry, and theological tracts from late antiquity to the mid-fourteenth century--Cuffel examines attitudes toward the corporeal body and its relationship to divinity. She shows that these religious traditions shared notions of the human body as distasteful, with many believers viewing corporeality and communion with the divine as incompatible. In particular, she explores how authors from each religious tradition targeted the woman's body as antithetical to holiness..
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Examines this forceful emotion from philosophical, literary, and art historical perspectives. .
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Susan Miller, author of two foundational works on shame (The Shame Experience [TAP, 1985/1993pbk]; Shame in Context [TAP, 1996]), now turns to disgust, an intriguing emotion that has received little attention in the professional literature.  For Miller, the psychological study of disgust revolves around boundary issues: We tend to feel disgusted about things (from bodily processes to decaying organic matter to ethnic attributes of "foreign" people) that lie on the border between our sense of self and nonself or between our sense of "good self" and "bad self."  Miller's clinical and everyday examples of disgust lead her to explore the developmental grounding of the capacity to disgust, and this topic opens to consideration of the relation of the various sensory modalities to disgust reactions.  Why, Miller asks, do we see disgusting images and smell disgusting smells but not hear disgusting sounds?  And further, what makes sensory impressions or objects "disgusting" to certainpeople but not to others? Why do the images and smells of disease so frequently elicit disgust?  And what is the relation of disgust to sex, procreation, and human intimacy?

Laced with developmental insights and vivid illustrations of disgust-related syndromes, Disgust: The Gatekeeper Emotion incorporates cultural analysis that links disgust to images of illness and health, to family life, to group identity, and to artistic and scientific creativity.  For Miller, the central disgust dialectic - the self's need to safeguard itself against noxious intrusions from without and simultaneously to nourish itself through contact with "otherness"  - obtains whether the discourse concerns nature, nations, or noses. With her typically graceful and gracious prose, Miller puts disgust on the psychological map and thereby adds a chapter to our understanding of the role of emotion in therapy and in everyday life. .
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