publications such as Technical Communication Quarterly, Enculturation, POROI, Kairos, American Journal of Entrepreneurship, and Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition.
Kate Maddalena is associate professor at the Institute of Communication, Culture, and Information Technology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Her articles and chapters have appeared in publications such as Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Canadian Journal of Communication, International Journal of Communication, Theory, Culture & Society, and POROI.
Tha authors applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, Disgustatory!: A Gothic Rhetoric of Consumption, with the following results:
Page 99 of Disgustatory! describes a paradigm shift in microbiology that happened around 2015 and had implication for all of the life sciences, especially medicine. Basically, researchers declared that we should no longer consider individual organisms–the human body, for example–as individuals, at all. Rather, we should think of our bodies as holobionts, or “biomolecular networks” that include the microorganisms that live on and inside us. From this perspective, I am not an autonomous, singular creature. I am a large colony of microorganisms. Further, I am not easily distinguishable from my environment; the bacteria on the table in front of me that get on my fingers and into my mouth are constantly becoming part of me, and when I leave my biological traces on the table, I am becoming part of it. The very bottom of page 99 transitions to our consideration of this holobiontic paradigm via Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection.Visit Jeremy Tirrell's website and Kate Maddalena's faculty webpage.
At first glance, the Page 99 Test does not work very well for our book. A passing reader might think that the book is a history of microbiology, which it most definitely is not. But looking closer, it does exemplify a few things about the experience of reading Disgustatory! First, you’ll find out lots of things you didn’t know. The book is full of little mini-histories and facts that fascinate and intrigue. The fact that microbiology had a profound paradigm shift in 2015 is probably news to most people. Second, you’ll probably be able to relate to it–when you think about it, you might realize that you did notice that your own conversations about health had turned away from cleanliness and sterility to things like probiotics and maintaining a healthy microbiome during the last decade.
And finally, the turn to Kristeva’s concept of abjection at the bottom of the page is a sample of the larger lens of the book. We take theories of the Gothic (in this case, a sense of profound body horror) and map them onto the weird wellness discourses of our contemporary moment: restrictive diets, lab-grown meat, fecal transplants, kombucha cultures, meal replacement powders, intentionally ingested intestinal parasites, to name just a few. All of these things are compelling and strange aspects of “health” discourse that contribute to a confusing and frankly scary moment in the history of health.
--Marshal Zeringue
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