Matthew Wolf-Meyer: Unsettling disgust and how it keeps us apart (Ep468)
“Disgust is a barrier between people, fundamentally, or between people and substances. And I think it’s important for us to really confront those barriers in ways that unsettle our disgust.”
Where do our senses of disgust come from? What does it mean to interrogate and unsettle the ways that our senses of disgust may have been shaped? And how has the Standard American Diet limited curiosity while reinforcing certain social hierarchies?
In this episode, we welcome Matthew Wolf-Meyer, the author of American Disgust: Racism, Microbial Medicine, and the Colony Within.
Join us as we explore the social and biological histories of our most visceral emotion, how disgust has been used as a tool of settler colonialism, and more.
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About our guest:
Matthew Wolf-Meyer is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. His work focuses on medicine, science, and media in the United States, and draws on history, contemporary experiences, and popular representations of health and illness. Across his research, he focuses on how personhood and subjectivity are produced and transformed over the life course. This includes concerns about how the care of children and the elderly reflect cultural expectations of what it means to be normal, how the structure of families and other institutions reflect social concerns, and how attention to experiences of disability and illness can help build more inclusive societies.
His first book, The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life (2012), is the first book-length social scientific study of sleep in the United States, and offers insight into the complex lived realities of disorderly sleepers, the long history of sleep science, and the global impacts of the exportation of American sleep.
Artistic credits:
Song feature: “Peaches” by Isla Greenwood (@islagreenwood on Instagram)
Episode artwork: Katia Ostermayer Carneiro
Dive deeper:
American Disgust: Racism, Microbial Medicine, and the Colony Within, a book by Matthew Wolf-Meyer
The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life, a book by Matthew Wolf-Meyer
Proposals for a Caring Economy, a book edited by Matthew Wolf-Meyer
Check out the Disgusting Food Museum in Malmö, Sweden
Learn more about anthropologist Mary Douglas
Purity and Danger, a book by Mary Douglas
Pure Immanence, a book by Gilles Deleuze
Discover the work of late filmmaker David Lynch
Expand your lenses:
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interview transcript
Disclaimer: Please note that Green Dreamer’s interviews are minimally edited (both audio and non-verbatim transcript) for clarity and brevity only. All statements should be understood as commentary based on publicly available information, and the views expressed in this interview are those of the guest and host only and do not necessarily reflect the views of Green Dreamer.
While we have made reasonable effort in our interview research and production process to ensure accuracy, we do not present our commentary as factual assertion and we are unable to guarantee the completeness or correctness of every piece of information shared. As such, we invite you to view our publications as references and starting points to dive more deeply into each topic and thread explored. Thank you for adventuring with us.
Kaméa Chayne: You say that our lives are too devoid of disgust in a weird way, and that we're disgusted by all the wrong things, and we need to be more disgusted about the right things.
So, I'd love to start here and ask you what you mean by the statement that our lives are too devoid of disgust. Like, who does we refer to, and what are these wrong or right things to feel disgust for?
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: Yeah. When I write about we, I'm really talking about, like, Americans. And really kind of, like, upper-middle-class Americans, probably. But Americans generally. And what I have been thinking about, and in the book I talk a lot about, what's referred to as the Standard American Diet, which is abbreviated to SAD, often.
When you think about the Standard American Diet and its portrayal, it's kind of bland and safe. You know, like, the images that often get used are, like, fast food meals where it's like really starchy, and it is just the most you taste is salt and fat, right? The flavors are not complex. And that's not what human diets have been. And it's not what human diets look like globally. And the way that Americans have kind of worked themselves into a dietary space where their food is pretty bland, and not particularly challenging from an aesthetic or taste experience, has been something that, like, I wrestle with a lot, because it's monotonous. And that monotony of texture and taste, and even just the substance that you're eating, right, like, what does it do to a person to just eat the same stuff all of the time? And so, I've really been thinking a lot about how taste, particularly, is one of these arenas of disgust for us. And texture goes along with that.
You know, so, like, why are Americans kind of suspicious of food that's slimy? We don't have a lot of slimy foods in our diets. That's not universally true. You know, you can find fruit around the world that's slimier than what Americans will tolerate. And you know, like, desserts that are slimy in ways that Americans really do not like. And so kind of experimenting with those textures is really interesting to me. But also just flavor profiles. Like, when you think about the things that Americans are suspicious of eating, a lot of it is, like, spicy stuff. Or, you know, spicy, both in the kind of flavorful sense, but also the temperature sense.
And we are taught to find certain kinds of foods disgusting because of the associations that we have with them. And that has a lot to do with who makes those foods. And we associate smells with certain kinds of people and certain kinds of food. And so all of this stuff gets mapped together in ways that I think, like, is based on an American diet that's really bland, and odorless, and, like, non-confrontational in ways.
But challenging what we're eating, or, like, our sense of disgust through what we eat and how we eat, is a way to kind of open up our perspective about why we find the things disgusting that we do, and why we find the things palatable that we do. And I think that's, you know, generally true, like, that there's a lot of work now from psychologists about being disgusted by other people, not because of who they are, but because of their political stances. And disgust is a barrier between people, fundamentally, or between people and substances. And I think it's important for us to really confront those barriers in ways that unsettle our disgust.
You know, the metaphor that I use is that we need to kind of confront that disgust in ways to think about what's on the other side of it. Both for us as individuals, but like, who are those people, or what is that food? Or what is that medicine? Or whatever it is. Disgust is something that limits our curiosity, fundamentally, and wrestling with it in productive ways exposes us to whatever's on the other side.
Kaméa Chayne: Well, I'm gonna get to the cultural aspect in a little bit, but I'm also curious if we were to backtrack and go to the, maybe, foundations of disgust, is there a sort of evolutionary function of the sense of disgust? And what do we understand about that, and whether sometimes it's good to feel discussed for certain things, for maybe, survival reasons, or health, and so forth.
Like, maybe stripped of the more historical context and cultural aspects. Like, down to the evolution in biology aspects. What do we know about that?
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: Yeah. It's actually really hard to say with any definitive sense that there is a natural sense of disgust. If you look cross-culturally and historically, anything that we might think of as being disgusting, some society in the past, or even in the present, is totally okay with it. And you also think, developmentally, that, you know, one of the things that parenting guides are often recommending is, like, teaching your child not to play with their feces, right? Little kids will do it. They'll put their hands in their diaper, they have no problem with getting dirty, and you have to teach a kid not to do it, right? Some people would think that there's like an innate disgust around that stuff, and there just isn’t. A lot of stuff needs to be taught.
But the example that I often talk about with people is that in Icelandic sagas, so like the Icelandic Vikings, they venerated people who could drink vomit. And it's, like, nobody likes vomit. That's one of those substances that, like, we pretty much universally agree is disgusting. But to have a culture where people think that, like, it's not only an okay thing to do, it's actually kind of the best thing that you could do, is really phenomenal, right? And so, you know, sometimes people talk about, and when I say people, I mean evolutionary biologists, or psychologists, will talk about disgust as being this like evolutionarily developed mechanism to protect us from disease.
But it doesn't hold very well because if you think about, like, poisonous mushrooms, which you should find disgusting from that kind of perspective, people eat them all the time. You know, like, there's no innate sense that certain kinds of mushrooms are more disgusting than other ones, but they're definitely more poisonous than other ones, right? Or certain kinds of spoiled food. Like, you can't necessarily detect whether or not something's gone bad before you eat it, you know?
And so, like, we have no sense for E. coli. You know, there are all of these things that are endangering to us, but we'll eat it, right? And so it's really hard to find definitive proof that our sense of disgust is some kind of evolutionary protective tool for us, right?
Kaméa Chayne: I guess people say there's, like, the smell test. But I will say I don't think that's a hundred percent accurate either. Because oftentimes we can get sick from food that smells perfectly fine. Or something might smell stinky and nasty. But, like, stinky tofu in Taiwanese, Chinese cuisine, it smells not great, but it's actually perfectly fine to eat. So there's also that.
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: Yeah, it's for sure not. Can I tell you? So I was just at this place called the Disgusting Food Museum, which is in Malmö, Sweden. And, yeah, I mean, it's a museum, and it shows you a bunch of disgusting foods from around the world. But at the end, there's a tasting bar. And so you go down the line, and you can taste a bunch of disgusting food that they've determined as disgusting food. And it's exactly what you're talking about, right? It's stuff that smells really strong. Like, there are several kinds of cheese that just smell absolutely terrible, like fermented fish, and lots of bugs that don't smell at all.
But like, you know, there are some pretty recurring things that people find disgusting around food that's not their own. Like smell or texture, right, that it's something that they're not used to smelling. And for people who eat that stuff regularly, it might not be the best-smelling thing, but it's not something that they're repulsed by in quite the same way. So, you know, I'm really suspicious about evolutionary explanations about disgust. And that suspicion is something that I carry along. All of my evolutionary explanations for anything is something that I'm always a little…
Kaméa Chayne: Yeah. I think maybe part of the underlying message is that it's not possible to neatly separate biology from culture, from history. 'Cause everything is kind of entangled. And I mean, I observe my dogs a lot, and I see that they will go lick, like, the feces of my chickens. Like, I don't know, maybe there's probiotics in there that they feel like would be good for them. They do lick their vomit after they vomit sometimes.
So, yeah, it's interesting to think about that. Although they will also sometimes walk by a patch of greens that they usually will forage and kind of nibble at. And then other times they'll walk by it and smell it a little bit and then just leave. Not necessarily 'cause they're disgusted by it, but maybe just 'cause their taste buds and their bodies are not craving whatever they sense is there. And, yeah.
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: Yeah. I mean, dogs are notoriously disgusting. Exactly what you're saying. Like, we've lived with dogs over the years, and they have really bad senses of disgust. But, it's hard to say whether or not what they subject themselves to is, like, good for them. But they, like, see no problem licking up some vomit, or eating strange feces, or whatever it is, right?
And so, I'm also a little suspicious about animal models of disgust. Like, when we talk about the disgust of other species, can you map it onto humans? And I think it's really unlikely.
Kaméa Chayne: Yeah. Yeah, I definitely have a lot more questions than I have answers, but I do think about research, for example, showing that kids who grew up in households with dogs tend to have less allergies and things like that compared to households without dogs. And you think about how dogs are rolling around in the dirt and licking random things and coming back. And, yeah, I think that's a curiosity that I'm interested in, and that we’ll probably unpack in a little bit as well.
But I wanna come back to this cultural and historical element. So, what do we know about how disgust has been shaped through settler colonialism and other histories tied to race, class, and other social hierarchies and structures?
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: Yeah. So, it is often the case when you are looking at colonial contexts that colonizers and the colonized exist on two sides of a disgust barrier, right? So, like, the colonizers often cast the colonized as being disgusting in various ways. And it's their food ways, sometimes it's the kinship structure of their family, like who marries who, and who's having children with who. It can be religion and political structures. Like, it gets used in all sorts of ways in order to create those distances between people.
The story that I tell in American Disgust is really thinking about the use of biological material as medicine in North America. And that one of the things that colonizers observe are Indigenous people using excrement and urine as medicinal substances. And they map their disgust with those substances onto their disgust with those people. And so there's this kind of intensification of their associations between particular people and their practices, and the substances that they're using in order to do stuff.
And that stuff is really hard to untangle because…that's part of the story that I try and tell in American Disgust, that, like the way that American medicine has created the category of biologics, as opposed to pharmaceuticals or supplements, right, is really indebted to this idea that like certain kinds of substances are dangerous because of the people associated with those substances. And that's not an uncommon story, but it just looks different in different places.
You know, when we think about the British in colonial India, they did much of the same stuff in thinking about Indian medical practices like Ayurveda, that, like, those substances and those people are both kind of dangerous in particular kinds of ways. And the fact that those people use those substances means that they're not like us. So, you know, again and again, looking at the historical record, you see how disgust kind of operates as this barrier between the colonizer and the colonized. And the kind of long trajectory of how it influences social relations in the present.
Kaméa Chayne: So it's often used, I guess, also to discredit certain forms of knowledge. And to say, like, this is the right way to do something, and this is just pseudoscience, or, like, invalid. And I think there's a fine line there, too, because pseudoscience does exist. But then also there are a lot of forms of knowledges that actually are generational knowledges, Indigenous sciences, et cetera, that often get labeled by mainstream ways of knowing as being unreliable, or not valid. So.
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: Yeah. I think it's often the case that claims around the non-scientific status of certain kinds of medical practices and substances, it’s born out of, like, skepticism and ignorance more than it is out of, like, rigorous scientific method. Right? And, the United States tends to privilege things that are, you know, made in enormous factories.
Like, pharmaceuticals, we seem to have very few suspicions about, but it's stuff that is naturally occurring that people really are suspicious around. And the prospect that, you know, something that comes out of your body could be medicinal in some way is really challenging to a lot of people, right? Or coming out of the body of somebody else, right?
And so, a lot of what I'm wrestling with in that book is, like, how do we deal with something like fecal microbial transplants that are proven effective, and they're, like, you know, what people refer to as exquisitely effective for certain kinds of things. Their success rate is nearly a hundred percent, and the side effects are minimal, and yet there's all of the suspicion around their use. And that, you know, is the complex situation where, like, there's not an easy answer around why people don't want to use something as a medicine. And, unraveling that history around, like, why is it that we think certain kinds of substances are suspicious?
Kaméa Chayne: Yeah. I wonder if part of it is also the variability factor, because when people have this idea of things being mass-produced, we have this conception of, like, everything is exactly the same. Like every formula in these pills are the same. So we know what to expect. But when an Auntie is making an herbal medicine from her own garden, like, people might not feel the same sense of trust because it's so highly variable what this Auntie made versus what that grandma made with her garden, and so forth.
Not to say there's anything wrong with that. I think, also, we have to remember that there's no average body, like, every body is different. So there's so much variability in our bodies that maybe, like, meeting that with variable medicine is also a part of what could be beneficial.
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: Yeah, I think a lot about things like tinctures in Traditional Chinese Medicine, right? Where you'll see a practitioner who will give you a set of ingredients in a bag, and you take out whatever amount over a certain period of days or weeks. And I think often the practice is predicated on the idea that there's variability in dosage in a way, right? But because you are doing it for two weeks or a month, as opposed to taking a couple of pills three times a day for three days, like, the effect over time ends up being kind of the same, right? So when we think about medicine in its kind of social context, it's often the case that, like, the way that traditional medicines have developed over time adapt to the ingredients that they're using, right? Or whatever, the practices that they use that we think medicine operates at the speed that it does in the U.S. is because of the pharmaceuticalization of medicine, right? That it’s all in a pill.
//musical intermission//
Kaméa Chayne: I wanna come back to fecal matter transplant. So, on this you say, “Whether clinicians are actively conceptualizing what they're doing as a colonial practice when they perform a fecal microbial transplant is ultimately less important than that the metaphor continues to dominate how Americans conceptualize the action of bodies on each other. Colonization is invasive. It makes things alike. It displaces what was there in favor of those more powerful. Fecal microbial transplants might be a good form of colonialism promoting health and remedying life-threatening disorders, but they're inextricable from the medical logic of changing bodies through displacement of one community and its replacement with another.” End quote.
And I think what comes to mind for me is, I'm involved with some efforts of reforestation that are intended to convert previously converted monocultural plantations back into, like, the regeneration of a biodiverse forest ecosystem. And I wonder if this logic of fecal matter transplant is maybe less like colonization and more like reforestation and regeneration of a monocultural, already disrupted community that was the product of colonial capitalist food systems breeding ill-health. Because colonial food systems inevitably breed different colonization-influenced gut microflora. So, I'm curious what else you've thought through on this.
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: Yeah, it's a nice analogy. One of the things that I was trying to work away from is the language that gets used around rewilding. The idea being that there used to be a strip mall and now it's not being used, and so let's tear it down and turn it into a, like, park or whatever. Just an open field of things growing there. And the reason why I try to move away from it is because, like, when you actually look at rewilding efforts, more often, it's just kind of like a bunch of invasive species that move in. Like, it's not returning it to some pristine nature if that ever existed. Like, you're basically just letting some other nature take over that space.
I think the thing with fecal microbial transplants is that, you know what you're doing...I guess we haven't talked about it in detail. Like, you're taking a stool sample from a healthy person, putting it through a process where you can then put it into a sick person. And, ideally, what you're doing is you're taking, like, a bunch of microbes from that healthy person, and you're installing them in that sick person's body. And those microbes will get to work and rebalance things. When it works, it's great, and it can be really effective.
But one of the challenges that started to present itself is that, like, because of people's suspicions around using actual excrement from people, and the complications of finding donors and putting them through screening processes and all of that stuff, there was this kind of push toward creating industrial fecal microbial transplants. And that they would be standardized in particular kinds of ways, and those microbes would be grown in these enormous vats. And it didn't work. None of those efforts seemed to have panned out. But the idea there, I think, is really, like, well, we're gonna standardize everybody's gut. We're gonna use the same microbes on everybody.
And when you really look through the, like, testimonies of people who go through fecal microbial transplants, many of them are, like, trying to find the right donor. Not in the sense that like they're trying to find a healthy person. They're trying to find the person whose microbes fit together with the microbes in their body in ways to, like, come up with a synthetic whole that is the best outcome for that sick person. And that can take a long time. And it often means really relying on broad networks of donors and people that you might not necessarily be very intimate with, but that, like, have what you need in some fundamental ways. And in that way, like, they're not creating standard microbial communities, they're creating really individual ones.
So, I think in some ways, that it is kind of like your reforestation efforts in that, like, you're trying to get this gut system to be, not necessarily what it was, but maybe the best thing for the environment that it's in. I mean, the person that's involved, right?. But, or maybe it's an and, that, you know, like reforested space, it's not just about that, like, individual body, it's thinking about that person's body in its environment And so, like, their diet and the other daily practices that they go through, right, are things that really need to be thought about when people are going through that process.
I think a lot about how, you know, you have these microbial colonies on your body. And what biologists have discovered is, like, if you share a bed with somebody, within three days, your microbial colonies and that person's microbial colonies have basically intermingled, and they've started to change in observable ways.
And I think it's really important for us to, like, come to terms with the fact that, like, our bodies are a little more fluid than we imagine them to be, right? And that it's not just what we're eating, but also where we're spending time and who we're spending time with that changes the makeup of our bodies and these kind of discreet ways.
Kaméa Chayne: I think I need to update my analogy from earlier. Because now that you walked me through this whole thing, I have a much clearer understanding. I feel like it's probably more like, fecal matter transplant is this generic tree planting project, but amongst tree planting projects, there are very problematic versions of tree planting projects that don't take into account the existing ecosystem, and the community dynamics there, and what is necessary to meet the place. So the more, like, standardized, top-down, one-size-fits-all sort of approach, versus understanding that every body is unique and it takes time to really get to know what's there and what each individual ecosystem needs. So there's a lot more ways to deepen into, I guess, the common threads between efforts of regenerating an ecosystem and regenerating more life-affirming bodies, I guess.
And overall, you paint this bigger picture observation of how American biomedicine has changed and been on the cusp of acknowledging the role of microbes, but has turned away from the microbial again and again. So what do you mean by this, and what are the deeper influences there that, yeah, you'd like to unravel?
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: Yeah. What I mean by it is really that, like, if you look at the history of American biomedicine, there are these moments where an awareness that microbes play an important part in our well-being recurs over time. And they might lead us to really think about a different way of doing medicine, right? So, like I was saying earlier, when we think about biologics as medicinal material, we might think about whole categories of things that are derived from our bodies that serve curative effects. That tends to not be the pursuit of pharmaceutical companies who are more interested in identifying chemicals that they can produce in industrial contexts, and then replicate with particular kinds of effects that are known.
Alongside that, when we think about medicine as being something that, like, only occurs in the interactions that we have with doctors, right, that kind of clinical space, one of the tensions that kind of exist within is that, like, well, there are all of these other practices that sometimes we think about as wellness, or just dieting, or whatever, that are medicinal too, right? That, like, we have the diets that we do in part because we think that they're good for us, right? And that when we think more holistically about what medicine is comprised of, that it's not just clinical encounters, but it's also our diets and our exercise and how we sleep and all of these other kinds of things that are related to our body, then it kind of expands the contours of what medicine is.
And we wanna think about all of that stuff in relationship to one another, right? That, like, when you think about why people develop the gut illnesses that they do, that fecal microbial transplants are so effective against, it's often, like, the case that it's because they've taken too many broad-spectrum antibiotics. But the reason why they do that might be because their diet is limited in particular kinds of ways. And their exposures to their environment are limited in particular kinds of ways. And so being able to think holistically about individuals who are sick means really thinking about them beyond the kind of immediate clinical context, right? And so, you know, we're living through this moment right now where there's all this attention to microbes in our diets, right? So like, all the prebiotics and probiotics that are marketed to us, most of them aren't particularly effective because they, like, break down in our gut, right? And they don't get to our intestines where they need to be.
It seems like what's more effective are actual foods that are full of microbes that, like, they get into our intestines in ways that are really productive for us. But we don't really think about this as medicine in quite the same way. And so really thinking about the microbial and its interactions with us means thinking beyond the clinic in some fundamental way, right? We need to think about what are the exposures that we're tolerating or seeking out, and what are their effects on us? But I mean, the flip side of it, like we were talking about earlier, is like, where are our sites of sterility? Where are the places where we're not being exposed enough?
There's this study that was done a while ago where they took two floors of an office building, and one of them, they limited the HVAC system, so it would just recycle air on the same floor. And the other one, they opened windows. And the rates of illness, this is pre-pandemic actually, but the rates of illness on the people with the open windows was something like 70% less than the people who were on that recycled floor.
And what they also found is, like, the microbial content of that office space was way more diverse than the other one, right? That like just having windows open and letting air move through a space meant that people were less sick and they were, like, exposed to more different kinds of stuff. And I think it's often the case, we don't think about those sterile environments, or lack of exposure in particular kinds of environments, and how we might open them up so that people are exposed to stuff that is maybe beneficial to them. Because, like, we do know things about what's supportive of our health. And being able to integrate that through just everyday practices, but also policies, I think, is really important.
Kaméa Chayne: Well, I really appreciate your invitation for us to really think about what could be medicinal for us outside of institutions, outside of the clinic. So I think that's something we'll continue to meditate on.
And finally, I know you make a distinction between unsettled and cultivated disgust. So what do you feel is important to differentiate between the two, and what is your invitation for us in terms of unsettling disgust and what this might do for us?
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: Yeah. Well, to kind of circle back to where we started, I think a lot of our disgust reactions are what I refer to as cultivated. That we're taught to be disgusted by certain kinds of things. And I say cultivated in part because it's not often the case that you have one interaction with something and you're disgusted with it. Like, you need to have several interactions and have the reinforcement of parents or peers or whoever it is in order to get to the point where you're, like, actually disgusted by something.
And, so I think that there's a way that, like, it's really productive to challenge or confront our feelings of disgust. And that can be, like, eating food that's unfamiliar to us, or that's challenging in one way or another. It can also be just through the media we consume. You know, I mentioned in the book, Jackass, as a context to, like, confront one's disgust about bodies and what they're doing. But there's any number of things to watch that can have a similar kind of effect.
But relatively safe things to do that, like, when you think about eating uncommon foods to you, like, what's the worst that's gonna happen? Maybe you spit it out, right? But it is this opportunity to move beyond the boundary that disgust creates for us. Like I was saying earlier, the Disgusting Food Museum is like this context for people to, like, push themselves in ways that is maybe a little bit unsettling to them. And it would be interesting to have people encounter other kinds of things that they find disgusting to see what happens to them. That might be going to like sewage treatment facilities. It may very well be disgusting, but like what happens when we encounter that kind of experience?
And yeah, so I'm just always encouraging people to interrogate that experience of disgust and think about what is on the other side of it. You know, like what happens if you do the thing instead of sort of back away from it.
Kaméa Chayne: Yeah. One final question on this for you is, how about disgust, for example, the actions of people who are treating others really horribly? Like a more, maybe, social type of disgust that isn't quite as visceral. But a lot of us do experience or feel disgusted when we see other people being really brutal against other people and stuff like that.
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: I think similarly that disgust in those contexts is often the grounds on which we back away from an interaction, right? That, like, when someone is doing something terrible to somebody else, and we feel repulsed by it, like, we're repulsed by that person in ways that, like, stop us from interacting with that person. And I think that there's, like, similarly, this opportunity there to push through that disgust and have that interaction in order to do the right thing in some fundamental way, right? That, if we're disgusted by something, we're receiving some kind of cue from somewhere.
Like it's been cultivated in us. How it's been cultivated is maybe more difficult to unravel, but, like, in that moment, there's an opportunity to confront whatever that thing is, right? And, if that means confronting a person or confronting a food that you're unfamiliar with, right, they're like operating from the same space. And, I think it's important to work through it. I mean, maybe those are both sites of confrontation, right? That you're like confronting your taste buds or a textural sensation, but you're also possibly confronting other people in order to unsettle whatever the nature of the relation is.
Kaméa Chayne: What has been one of the most impactful books you've read lately or publications you follow?
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: I'm working through a book right now called Pure Immanence, by a philosopher named Gilles Deleuze, which is the last thing that he wrote. But he is really trying to work through, like, how do we know ourselves as individuals in relationship to the experiences that we have. And it's been on my bookshelf for a really long time. And it's my, like, summer reading.
Kaméa Chayne: What is a motto, mantra, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: I'm not sure that any of it is codifiable in language, but I am always drawn to my boredoms. In the sense that, like, if I find something that I think, like, oh, there's nothing there, I can't imagine spending my time with something like that, that's when I have to, like, double down and really interrogate why I'm not doing the thing. And so, I often need to interrogate my boredoms.
Kaméa Chayne: Yeah, that resonates for me as well. And what is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: At the moment. Weirdly, it's the work of David Lynch. As a filmmaker, he was someone who was really impactful for me. I guess it goes back to some of my origins of disgust. But his, like, most normal movie is this movie called Straight Story. And he said, and I need to find this quote at some point, that sometimes the most challenging thing is normalcy. And I think about that all the time, that like having something be just absolutely normal, can be like really unsettling to people. And I spend a lot of time thinking about that.
Kaméa Chayne: Well, Matthew, it's been an honor to share this time with you. A really thought-provoking conversation that I'm looking forward to revisiting after this. And as we wrap up here, where can people go to find your book and support your work? And what closing words of wisdom do you have for us?
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: All of my work is really published through the University of Minnesota Press. And so the press's website will lead you both to American Disgust, but other books on the history of sleep, and a more recent book called Proposals for a Caring Economy.
Kaméa Chayne: Any final, final words of wisdom for us as screen dreamers?
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: I think I have absolutely no words of wisdom at this point in my life. I am not sure.
Kaméa Chayne: Maybe to tie in our conversation, any words of guidance for people who feel absolutely disgusted by the state of the world right now, and how you'd invite people to lean into that.
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: Well, I mean, I just mentioned it. So this book, called Proposals for a Caring Economy, is this attempt on my part to really, like, work through hope. I think that it is really easy to feel cynical and depressed, given the state of things. And I worry that we don't really have good models for thinking about the kind of world that we actually wanna inhabit.
And so that was part of the impetus in that book and thinking through, like, well, actually, there are like really important things that we can do in order to make lives more livable. And we need to identify those things and embrace them. And I think that that's, like, one of the things that we're really missing right now, that, like, we don't have models to think about what kind of future we wanna inhabit.
And I think individually and collectively, we need to think proactively about building a better world rather than just being reactive to the conditions that we currently find ourselves in. And so, I guess, I mean, me at my most hopeful, is like, we need to really think about, what is the world that we wanna inhabit and how do we make that come into being? Rather than really be buttressed by all of the terrible stuff that's happening. It's imagination-limiting in ways that allow terrible things to continue to happen. And what we really need are like imaginaries of a future that we find compelling enough that they motivate us to, like, make the changes that we need to make in order to bring those futures into being.
