Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot

by Kyla Wazana Tompkins

How deviant materials figure resistanceYeast ferments, gelatin jiggles, drugs and alcohol froth and bubble, and flesh from animals and plants actively molds and rots. These materials morph through multiple states and phases, and their movement is imbued with a liveliness that is suggestive of volition.Deviant Matter examines four aesthetic and material categories— gelatinousness, fermentation, putrefaction, and intoxication—to theorize how the modern state seeks to manage deviant populations across multiple scales, from the level of the single cell up to the affective and aesthetic imperatives of the state and its bureaucratic projects. Kyla Wazana Tompkins deploys a new materialist engagement with the history of race and queer life, making an argument for queer of color method as political and disciplinary critique. Deviant Matter delves into a vast archive that includes nineteenth-century medical and scientific writing; newspaper comic strips and early film; the Food and Drug Act of 1906; the literature of Martin Delany, Louisa May Alcott and Herman Melville; and twenty-first century queer minoritarian video, installation, and performance art.Drawing from the genealogy of Black feminist and queer of color critique, in Deviant Matter rot, jelly, ferment and intoxicating materials serve as figures for thinking about how matter, art, politics, and affect can be read across multiple scales, ranging from the intimate and molecular everyday to the vast print production and inner workings of the state. Tompkins demonstrates that we are moved by our encounters with the materials in Deviant Matter, producing feelings and sensations that she links to a system of social value where these sensations come to be understood as productive, exciting, disgusting, intoxicating, or even hallucinatory. Moving through multiple states and phase changes, falling apart and reforming again, ferment, rot, intoxicants and jelly energize and choreograph both themselves and human behavior. At the same time, these materialities come to signify exactly those populations whose energy escapes the extractive efforts of capitalism and the state.

Genres: Nonfiction, Queer

280 pages, Paperback

Published December 17, 2024

Reviews

[aerialxav]

Introduction

[J Earl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deviant Matter by Kyla Wazana Tompkins is a work that seems to present some ideas we have largely confronted (for me, primarily through Foucault) but expanded from the extremely macro level to the micro level. Combined with considering matter that might change shape and state and that often elicit strong reactions from people, we are tasked with understanding how changes in scientific methods and processes have been appropriated to maintain marginalized populations at the periphery of society and culture.

I am going to state up front that I am going to need a couple more times through the book to grasp even a fair amount of the nuance. That said, the bigger picture, if I am seeing the picture correctly, is quite accessible with some effort. Because of that I am not going to offer much detailed commentary beyond my opening paragraph, you need to read the book to get what matters most to you from what is offered.

What I want to say here has more to do with the effect the book has had in just the couple of days since I finished it. In some ways a book that presents the reader with a new perspective through which to view future events has done its job.

I was looking through some open access books and a couple of passages stuck out because of having read Deviant Matter. First, in the abstract for The French Invention of Menopause and the Medicalization of Women's Ageing by Alison M Downham Moore, the following sentence seems to speak, at least in part, to the processes discussed in Deviant Matters. "Older women were identified as an important patient cohort for the expanding medicalisation of French society and were advised to entrust themselves to the hygienic care of doctors in managing the whole era of life from around and after the final cessation of menses." We have the institutionalizing of medicine, and, as the rest of the abstract mentions, the marriage of medicine and politics. Equally curious when considered alongside Deviant Matter is the following sentence. "It tells a complex story of how women’s ageing featured in the demographic revolution in modern science, in the denigration of folk medicine, in the unique French field of hygiène, and in the fixation on women in the emergence of modern psychiatry."

Second, in the abstract for Medicine in an Age of Revolution by Peter Elmer, we have several sentences which address similar ideas. The one that best sums up the strands of the argument follows. "The body politic, a Renaissance commonplace, was now peopled by medical practitioners who often claimed a special authority when it came to diagnosing the ills of late seventeenth-century society." Even going further back we have a medical/scientific approach to describing and "diagnosing" societal "ills."

I apologize if you were hoping for a nice summary of the book's thesis, I'm afraid that is a bit beyond my ability right now. The sentence in my opening paragraph gives a broad description. If you're looking for a work that might be a little challenging, and maybe a little slow at first, but offers you plenty to consider about how we use words and concepts, often without realizing it, to contribute to the marginalization of groups of people you will be richly rewarded with this book. I hope my examples give you an idea of what types of things may stand out for you to consider after you've finished this book.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

[Tucker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tompkins writes of a “sense of atmosphere as being violently everywhere, of an aesthetic and affective violence that adheres to you as the world you move through or (not so) simply as a condition of the everyday.”

Our world is changing in unclassifiable ways, and we with it. Sometimes we’re pushing through it, as if it were gelatin. We have “a wish to look directly at what is facing us,” the oncoming blob, the mess we travel with and against. The trash heap, the going-to-dieness, the matter overtaking us, the time limit, the disaster gazing inside itself for solution. The question of how we phrase our plea to power when power is demanding that we phrase it apolitically. How we appear, quivering.

"...gelatin renders waves of energy visible to the eye in real time, allowing scientists to measure, and the rest of us to witness, otherwise invisible energy through its effects as responsive, relational, material change. Gelatin makes visible what is generally invisible to the eye, like sound waves or other seismic and vibrational activity."

I imagine that, when we "push through a heavy space and time" like this political moment we're in, the jelly is around us, but we too are jelly. We quiver, but we're a force to be reckoned with. Just as much as the moment can change us, we can change it.

I got a free advance copy of Deviant Matter from NetGalley.