Eingeweide, Pillen, Feminismus

Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies

by Elizabeth A. Wilson

In Eingeweide, Pillen, Feminismus fordert Elizabeth A. Wilson Feministinnen auf, ihre ablehnende Haltung gegenüber biologischen und pharmazeutischen Daten zu überdenken. Sie stellt die Frage, welches begriffliche und methodische Neuland sich die feministische Theorie erschliessen kann, indem sie sich der Biologie gegenüber weniger instinktiv ablehnend verhält. Wilson nimmt sich Forschungen zu Antidepressiva, Placebos, Übertragung, Fantasie, Essstörungen und Suizidneigungen vor, um zwei Punkte inwieweit pharmazeutische und biologische Daten der feministischen Theorie nutzen können und welchen unverzichtbaren Stellenwert Aggression in der feministischen Politik hat. Eingeweide, Pillen, Feminismus provoziert die feministische Theoriebildung mit der Behauptung, dass sie wirksamer wäre, wenn sie sich mit biologischen Daten auseinandersetzen und ihr eigenes aggressives Potenzial zulassen könnte.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Science, Theory, Feminist Theory, Health, Food

Paperback

First published September 4, 2015

About the author

Elizabeth A. Wilson is Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University and the author of Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body, also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

[Alok Vaid-Menon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant. One of the best works of feminist theory in the past decade.

[6655321 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wilson's contribution is both extremely interesting and extremely frustrating in turn. This isn't to claim that her investigation on the antibiological underbelly of feminism isn't an important gut check (god i will make some terrible puns) but rather that there is some context for antibiological thinking that she somewhat glosses over: there is the central question (and it is extremely complicated especially within feminism especially within decolonial and trans feminism) of *how* or *why* one is a woman (which the biologically reductive account is a popular folk practice if not a particularly nuanced theoretical position that is endlessly tilting at windmills such as the TERF rhetoric) which is not really the biological question that Wilson is radically weighing in on (i.e. the actual corporeality of embodiment and mind and especially of trauma where her work really is outstanding) but which still haunts her work in her ignoring questions of how sexual difference is established especially in psychoanalysis (a methodology which she makes some very salient points in support of even if she is explicitly critical). Especially interesting and refreshing is her engagement with the question of whether "feminist politics are most effective... not when they transform the destructive into the productive, but when they are able to tolerate their own capacity for harm" (6).

[Sarah Cavar]

I would be a LOT more satisfied with this book if it made even an attempt to engage with critical disability studies, but there was no mention of it anywhere. How to engage with the bodymind holistically, complexly, and partially without engaging with disability, as well as Madness?

Still, coming at this from not only a CDS/CMS perspective but also a prison & psychiatric-abolitionist one does prove fruitful, especially in the later chapters about risk, harm, and repair. I would *only* ever recommend this book to someone alongside engagement with Eli Clare, Margaret Price, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Alison Kafer, Mark Fisher, and many others whose contribution this text ignores.

[Harris]

A pretty awesome call to rethink feminism's relationship with biology and to reevaluate contemporary feminism's understanding of itself. A deconstructive reading of mind/body shows that feminism's move to reject biology creates an entanglement that goes unacknowledged. Wilson then reads the contemporary literature on SSRIs with Derrida's take on the pharmakon to show that cure and harm can never be separated and the reparative turn in feminism after Sedgwick often forgets this. Wilson calls for a more aggressive, more capacious feminist theory that embraces this risk.

[Amber Sollenberger · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most readable theory books I've encountered, and consistently fascinating & thought-provoking. A rare account of Freudian concepts that I (mostly) understood and enjoyed, as well as introduction to all sorts of theorists and ideas what were new to me. Excited to reread this one in the future.

[J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

you are a left-leaning humanities academic. the year is 2015. after years of famine, there remain three available argument structures: unity of opposites, middle path, and calling things insufficiently radical. and you can only discuss the same fifteen writers as everyone else.

within these constraints you must say something true and useful. your task begins now

[Tomás Narvaja · Rating 5 out of 5]

Out of all the books I've read, this one is probably one of my all time favorites. Wilson demonstrates the usefulness of recognizing that psychology and the mind is an inherent capacity with/in biology. She effectively ruptures any clear cut distinction between biology and psychoanalysis and calls for a radically new understanding of medicine, the body, and identity. She writes incredibly beautiful and elegantly in a way that makes it significantly pleasurable to read compared to other academic texts of this caliber. She does not put down feminist anti-biologism, recognizing that to exclude it would be to re-enact the very dynamics of inclusion and exclusion she seeks to challenge. Wilson not only states her claim, she very clearly demonstrates it by engaging with biological and pharmacological data. There is a need to think and theorize not just about life, but through life, and Wilson demonstrates just how one might go about fulfilling such need. Its a book I find myself continually returning to, and with time I slowly have been realizing the incredible depths that Wilson's argument reaches, ones I am unsure even she anticipated. One great addition to this book, which would demonstrate the far reaching implications of Wilson's works is Hannah Landecker's essay, “Food as Exposure: Nutritional Epigenetics and the New Metabolism."

[saizine · Rating 4 out of 5]

"What I will argue in Gut Feminism is not that the periphery is a site of abandonment (a maligned fringe, a desolate border), but rather that the periphery is a site of intense biological, pharmaceutical, and psychological agency on which the center is always vitally dependent. Which is to say, the periphery is interior to the center; the stomach is intrinsic to the mind."

This is a difficult one to review for me - and my star rating probably errs more towards the 3.5 stars, if I'm honest. I found Gut Feminism fascinating, especially its interrogation and challenge of antibiologism. However, I also found the text remarkably dense, and although this usually doesn't bother me in this case it felt as if it could have obscured the many, many bright moments of startling and intriguing analysis: for example, the example of abdominal migranes, the discussion of bulimia and the gag reflex, and the discussion of antidepressants and placebos, particularly the possibility of conceptualizing the placebo as one half of a symbiotic relationship ("Every drug needs it placebo."). Nevertheless, these bright moments are more than worth it, and I'll be contemplating the intricacies of Wilson's argument for a while yet.

[Duke Press]

"From organ speech to enteric moods, the gut is minded and the mind gutted by this book. It promises and delivers readings of biochemistry, pharmacology, anatomy, and psychoanalysis as strange matters that are unsettling to biology and feminism alike. Provocative in its diagnosis of the rejection of biology in feminist theory, I expect many readers will both devour this book, and throw it around the room a little." — Hannah Landecker, author of Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies

"Wilson has written an interesting, yet rather difficult and thought demanding book, drawing from feminist theory and asking for a conceptual expansion of thoughts and ideas related to depression and the gut. The book is suited for those interested in feminist theory and the intersection of biology. . . . At the same time, the book is an interesting contribution in the classroom in such disciplines. . . ." — Hennie Weiss Metapsychology Online Reviews
01/05/2016

[Aaron · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an angry, hostile book; Wilson knows that, and thinks this is what feminist theory needs. I think anger has a place, but it does require exploration, sensitivity, and perhaps, at least when it is directed outward, either justification or apology (like, we live in a society! Our emotions affect those around us!) Wilson evidently disagrees.

There was arguably a need for a book that takes a feminist whole-body approach to neurology and psychology. I don't think this is that book. More attention to patients, less uncritical Freudian psychobabble, and *please* less wild speculation about the psychology of specific real-life teenage homicide and suicide victims.

*It is very possible I am not the intended audience for this book, at least at this point in my reading journey; I read it for a generals field in the history of biology, out of context with the feminist theory it relates to.

[JC · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this on recommendation of one of Michelle Murphy’s students, who knows I’m into metabolism as an analytic for my research. This monograph has a fairly different take on metabolism than the one eco-Marxists deploy, but it’s exactly the sort of engagement with contemporary metabolic sciences that scholars like Hannah Landecker say is sorely lacking in that body of discourse. And I think Marxists could do some pretty cool things in social metabolic theorizing with some of Wilson’s insights here. There’s already decent overlap between some of Wilson’s impulses and common Marxist orientations towards feminist STS, particularly Wilson’s arguments countering some forms of biological refusal and antibiologism. However, she dialectically also backpedals on what she sees as some feminists excessively embracing biological claims about the brain after the neuroscientific turn.

As someone who has suffered from a chronic gastrointestinal condition, which started around the same time I began counselling for depressive episodes (and began reading about psychosomatic conditions), I found Wilson’s exploration of psychiatry/psychoanalysis in concert with gastrointestinal sciences as a deeply intriguing project. A lot of it, granted, was over my head, but there were moments of clarity and revelation for me here. The processes by which the body metabolizes pharmaceuticals (particularly antidepressants) helps to recontextualize these substances as not merely “autocratic agents that operate unilaterally on body and mind; rather, they are substances that find their pharmaceutical efficacy by being trafficked, circulated, transformed, and broken down.” (p. 102) And I think the sort of things one could do by interfacing these types of reflections into the sort of environmental humanities that engage with metabolic rift theory would be really interesting to me. Wilson sees the data she has worked through as pointing “to the active role that gut metabolism plays in the pharmacological regulation of mood.” I think this is a fascinating way to bring affect into discussions of both bodily metabolism and social metabolism (how say energy, material pollutants, and commodified matter, circulate, flow, and transform both within the bodies of individual organisms (human and more-than-human) as well as political bodies/societies.

I’d like to come back and write some more about this book, but will just leave this long excerpt on Landecker from Wilson’s book here to conclude for now:

“Hannah Landecker’s (2013) meticulous work on the history and philosophy of metabolism helps me be more specific about the nature of ssri transference. The concept of metabolism, as it emerges in conventional form in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is concerned with how an organism turns food into energy: “The body was commonly regarded as analogous to a combustion engine, into which one fed fuel. Legions of experimenters studied humans and animals as though they were balance sheets, accounting for everything that went in, and everything that came out” (194). Unsurprisingly, these conventional accounts think of metabolic physiology primarily as “the problem of two” (196): organism and environment; body and food; inside and out. Landecker traces the work of a physiologist (Claude Bernard), a biochemist (Rudolph Schoenheimer), and a philosopher (Hans Jonas) who reconfigured metabolism “as a third concept” (195): each of these thinkers, in his way, envisages metabolism as a process that disrupts easy, self-evident distinctions between an organism and its world. Bernard was able to show that animals broke down sugars ingested from the environment (as conventional physiology would predict) but that they also manufactured substances like sugar. For example, a dog’s liver, even when removed from the body (and thus disconnected from the mechanics of ingestion) and completely exsanguinated, was able to continue producing sugars. A substance (sugar) that was supposed to be sourced only from outside the body and converted to fuel inside the body was also being made internally by the liver. The functions of the outside are to be found internally. Or, to put this psychodynamically, the world is introjected; and, like psychological introjections, the metabolism of sugars generates a milieu intérieur (the ability of living creatures to sustain a stable internal state somewhat independently of flux in their environment). Landecker notes that Bernard’s work on sugar “coalesced into the cornerstone of a philosophy of life, one articulated in direct opposition to the ‘dualist’ framework of plants generating energy and animals consuming it” (202). The certainty of two begins to break down when the location of the environment cannot be reliably said to be outside the body. A century later, and via a series of intellectual and experimental interlocutors, the philosopher Hans Jonas amplifies the dynamic nature of metabolism as understood by Bernard. For Jonas, metabolism’s relation to the inside and outside is one of entanglement: “Its function is not so much to be a boundary in between organism and environment, but to produce that distinction in the first place— to produce an ‘inwardness’ ” (216). In this critical tradition, Landecker writes, metabolism is what makes it possible for there to be an inside and an outside. There is not “a boundary between two things, but a dynamic production of there being two things at all; without metabolism there would be no need to have inside and outside, organism and environment, animal and world. In other words, there are not two entities which enter into exchange with one another, requiring a boundary to keep them distinct, but a third thing—metabolism—which produces the two-ness of organism and environment” (217).”

I'm doing some RA work on diabetes too, and this book along with Landecker’s new book will be useful for some of that future work, as well as my own environmental history research.

[M · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was not aware of how ingrained anti-biologism was within feminist theory, and I found it interesting how Wilson explored the different ways this stance strengthens but, more importantly, weakens its overall effectiveness. There were a lot of people referenced and while having read some of the mentioned authors, the constant referencing of other text and the recounting of experimentation made it difficult for me the grasp onto everything she was saying.
I did find a lot of the concepts interesting, like the bringing in of Freud with bitterness, how Prozac helped people with binging and purging problems, abdominal migraines, the idea of transference and the analytic third, pharmakon (I am curious to learn more about reparativity), and, most interestingly, the idea of the placebo. That “the placebo ends up being folded inside the technology that was allegedly developing to weaken or eradicate it” and remains attached to any drug that needs to be made but also acts as a threat to the drug industry in how well it works. In the conclusion of that chapter I was really struck by the fact that no placebo is “pure” as any pill is in part placebo because there always exists that suggestion.
I also became curious about whether doctors who administered placebos were charging the price of the placebo and if that was unethical or not—because what if the act of paying for your mental health treatment gives it more weight in hoping that it works?
The body is an ecosystem, and of COURSE, how could we forget that we are not god and we still don’t actually, really, truly know how it works—or works together.Generally, this text really makes me reconsider the things I am putting in my body and also that all the pickled vegetable are doing wonders for my mental health.

[Tallon Kennedy · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has some interesting things to say about the interconnectedness of mind and body, gut and mental health, but ultimately I find some of its premises shaky, and some of its arguments under-developed and blind to the realities of mental and physical disability. The book seems more interested in engaging with pharmacology and mental illness as examples of how feminist engagements with biology can be transformed, rather than thinking about the consequences of these arguments for the lived realities of people who struggle with mental illness. Ultimately, it's the impersonal "objective" standpoint that this book takes that undermines its capacity to make groundbreaking arguments. 4/10

[Roger Whitson · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is quite a bit to admire in Wilson's deconstruction of poison and cure in feminist and psychiatric discourse. She somehow makes Derrida's argument about the pharmakon in OF GRAMMATOLOGY clear and concise. She does the same thing with complex scientific theories regarding neuro-transmitters and gut flora. While none of my fields include psychiatric medicine, feminism, or biology, I still think that Wilson's approach is crucial for understanding how a rigorous approach to new materialism can change how we can critically evaluate scientific evidence without knee-jerk reactions.

[Sess · Rating 3 out of 5]

Given how hyped (in an academic sense) and referenced this book is in a lot of relevant and interesting work, I ultimately found this somewhat underwhelming. On occasion there was a paragraph or two with some very thoughtful and provoking sentiments, but the way that these stood out amongst the rest of the words indicated to me that Wilson was very intentional in writing them as snippets primed for quotation. Nonetheless, taken as a whole this book is definitely a useful read for those interested in feminist STS / fem new materialism / etc. etc., and the short length makes it very readable.

[Vanessa Lehan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall I really enjoyed this book and I think that Wilson's project is interesting and politically useful. I do feel that some of her conclusions are a bit too quick or a bit too broad (in the final chapter she implies that these conclusions are tentative and meant to be points of examination but I didn't get that impression earlier in the text).

[Eb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tackles big questions in an absolutely outrageous, wonderful way

[Madi · Rating 3 out of 5]

"If feminist theory is to continue to make trouble, it will need to form intimate and unruly alliances with biological data."

[Ella Louise Schalski]

Read for class

[Lizzy Karnaukh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Provocative ideas about how feminist theory should embrace natural science, but I admittedly lost interest halfway through

[Travis]

A fantastic intervention in feminist history of science studies, as well as gender and sexuality studies more broadly. Puts such great pressure on long-standing antibiologism in the field and does such smart readings of such an unexpected archive. The gut, as Wilson suggests, ruminates just as the mind thinks. What she does with the mind/body distinction is exciting and promising for the field and for extending the history and theory of the body.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wilson troubles the ways that feminism conceives of the body, arguing for a reassertion of the body into politics. She specifically focuses on the mind/gut dynamic--focusing on the ways these two systems are inevitably intertwined.