March 18

11:30am

Sage 5711

Recently, anthropologists have conceptualized the gut as a communicative interface, mediating relations of inside
and outside, body and environment, and self and other. I will present work from my dissertation, which asks:
How does contemporary gut surgery recraft these fundamental thresholds and allow life to persist in a leakier form? In a modern world suffused by ever more dangerous leaks, obstructions, ruptures, and complicated forms of bowel distress and therapy, my dissertation reexamines relations between the individual subject and collective life when the gut is stretched beyond its capacity to maintain these borders via the body; when it tarries with its own metabolic limit. Specifically, how might life continue when the threshold of the body is made dangerously porous, not just by excremental pathologies, but also the science and interventions designed to repair the gut? In gut collapse, the very mediation that gives “my body” any semblance of illusory coherence is at stake. My dissertation explores how people persist when the gut itself – the mediator of subjective thresholds – is lost in order to live otherwise. Forever grieving the gut through techniques of the body, new forms of excremental intimacy, and mourning practices offers an ethical possibility, beyond repair, for living in the ruins of gut collapse.