Grossed Out: The Carceral Logics of Disgust and the Demands of #MeToo

Abstract

Proclamations of disgust are de rigueur in the field of sexual harassment and sexual violence. Indeed, in the whisper network of women and others who may be susceptible to such onslaughts, members are often warned against creeps and told to keep their distance from colleagues or interlopers who are deemed gross, disgusting, vile. Disgust has a long history of marking boundaries not only of the body but also of the social. In this article, I take as my starting point the very public allegations of sexual violence against Harvey Weinstein. I read the long history of disgust as a moralizing framework that is both central to democratic politics and that continues to fail marginalized communities. I then situate these responses within an impasse that feminist work has struggled to overcome for decades, with little shift. Namely, it seems nearly impossible to name and attend to the saturation of sexual violence in the lives of women, people of color, the nonnormatively gendered, the incarcerated, the disabled, and other marginalized folks without falling into the trap of “all sex is rape” or without an overreliance on criminalizing forms of surveillance and panic mongering. This article is motivated by the question: How might an attention to the politics of disgust unseat the overreliance on legalistic frameworks of consent and criminal abnormality in approaches to sexual violence?