This work examines a number of sites of struggle over the cultural meaning of fatness. It is grounded in scholarship on identity politics, the social construction of beauty, and the subversion of hegemonic medical ideas about the dangers of fatness.

If the transgressions of modern French poetry have been amply noted at thematic and formal levels, they remain largely unremarked at the most visceral level of reading. Indebted to, while problematizing the Kristevan concept of sémiotique, Scott Shinabargar’s The Revolting Body of Poetry reveals how the very “matter” of key works forces us to enact these transgressions, when articulating textures of offensive lexica and imagery. While certain phonemes provide access to previously untapped forces, first apparent in Baudelaire and Lautréamont, compulsive repetitions produce expressive inflation, diffusing any initial impact. Césaire and Char, however, demonstrate an acquired control of these forces, intensity contained. Shinabargar concludes with a survey of contemporary poets, inviting readers to consider the legacy of revolting poetics.

This book looks at the phenomenon of self-directed disgust and examines the role of self-disgust in relation to psychological experiences and potential ensuing psychopathology and to physical functioning such as disability, chronic physical health, and sexual dysfunction.

In recent years the “body” has become one of the most popular areas of study in the arts, social sciences and humanities. Transgressive Bodies offers an examination of a variety of non-normative bodies and how they are represented in film, media and popular culture. Examining the non-normative body in a cultural studies context, this book reconsiders the concept of the “transgressive body”, establishing its status as a culturally mutable term, arguing that popular cultural representations create the transgressive or “freak” body and then proceed to either “contain” its threat or (s)exploit it. Through studies of extreme bodybuilding, obesity, disability and transsexed bodies, it examines the implications of such transgressive bodies for gender politics and sexuality. Transgressive Bodies engages with contemporary cultural debates, always relating these to concrete studies of media and cultural representations. This book will therefore appeal to scholars across a range of disciplines, including media and film studies, cultural studies, gender studies, sociology, sports studies and cultural theory.

This thesis explores why The Jungle and The Secret Agent —which both reference their own conditions of production, are both formally fragmented, and were both initially framed as part of a kind of revolutionary American journalism—are so preoccupied with bodies that have been mangled, disintegrated, and reduced to viscera. In each text, there is a character who rejects the conditions of his world and explodes against those conditions, and in each text such explosions are abortive: both characters and texts experience a “violent disintegration” (Conrad 215). Just as Jurgis is “torn to shreds” (Sinclair 145) and Stevie becomes a “heap of rags” (Conrad 106), The Jungle ends when narrative is supplanted by a disjointed call to arms, and The Secret Agent ends with the intercutting of newspaper stories with “images of ruin and destruction” (269). These characters, I conclude, are unable to realize the role of revolutionary protagonist set out for them, and ultimately experience the “shattering violence” (Conrad 107) of this contradiction: that though their revulsion against unjust societal conditions is offered as an aesthetic of revolution, this revulsion also prefigures the biopolitical conditions that will ultimately destroy their bodies and end their lives.