Paper short abstract:

The guts have been under the spotlights recently, largely thanks to work on the microbiome. But bowels are also the site of mundane, daily evaluation practices that challenge the centrality of given understandings of the body to push excrements and digestion centre stage.

Paper long abstract:

Critical theory extensively attended to the body as a site where theory matters. Recently, this focus began to concentrate more closely on the gut. This attention comes at a time of intensified intersections with life sciences, and the paradigm shift of microbiome studies that is repositioning eating, digesting, and shitting within biomedicine, and often places the emphasis on the novelty of scientific discoveries. Despite this apparent centrality, though, gut health in its more mundane aspects is still marginal, and so are the valuation practices that are shaped around it.

While symbolic anthropology famously considered the segregation of dirt and excrement as part of a system of meanings, much work in medical anthropology, nursing studies and STS of healthcare have complicated that understanding through the troubles brought about by bodies that are incontinent or constipated, or that variously struggle with their bowel activities.

Here, instead of focusing on settings in which the (not) digesting and (not) shitting body is mobilized through the difficulties of its recalcitrance, I attend to everyday sites in which good bowel movements are enacted and cared for. But what the gut is in these sites, and how 'good shit' is valued vary: in some cases the microbiome can be made relevant, but in others the food eaten is, or the time spent on the toilet. Attending to the evaluations taking place at this marginal interface of the body that is the gut, I argue, pushes us to think differently about how health and bodies can be made.