In moments of political pressure—colonial rule, incarceration, and border regimes—the body does not remain neutral. It reacts; it withholds, expels, and emphatically revolts. In Dissident Gut, Jean Walton takes this bodily dissent as her object of study, arguing that digestion itself is inherently a political process. As she understands it, metabolic disturbance is not only “wilful meddling, but also systemic intersection” of the alimentary tract with culture and society (2). The gut, she suggests, is not merely a passive autonomous biological system but more radically a site where biopolitics, class, gender, labor, and resistance collectively churn and converge. To be alive, Walton insists, is to be metabolically governed—and sometimes, metabolically insubordinate.
Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “bare life,” Walton reframes metabolism as the most elemental register of political control: the point at which certain bodies are permitted to function smoothly while others are obstructed, exposed, or regulated. Peristalsis—the involuntary muscular contractions that channel matter through the digestive tract—becomes, in Walton’s hands, a process that is intrinsically susceptible and influenced by history, infrastructure, ideology, and discipline.
The book is cleverly organized into two halves, Marco-Peristalsis and Micro-Peristalsis, moving from large-scale systems to intimate bodily practices. This structure mirrors Walton’s overriding argument: metabolism links the global and the granular, the sewer and the sphincter. The opening chapters situate metabolism within Marxist environmental thought, explicating Marx’s account of “metabolic rift,” in which urbanization hinders the cyclical exchange between human waste and agricultural soil, consequently “robbing the soil of important nutrients, and polluting urban waterways” (14-15). Walton adroitly expands this insight by arguing that cities themselves function as metabolic systems: urban environments are in an intimate metabolic relationship with “the goods, fuel, commodities, vehicles, people, water, information, electrical impulses and all other things that flow into and within” them (32). Waste, she suggests, is not simply what exits the body, but what remains unusable yet contained—whether in the intestines or infrastructure.
From here, Walton turns to what sociologist David Inglis has termed the “faecal habitus,” or how “bodily rites of elimination are tied in with class-based systems of distinction” (15). In the nineteenth century, bourgeois identity depended on the invisibility of excretion, as excretory dirt was “an important element in distinguishing refined bourgeois bodies from unrefined and filthy proletarian flesh” (Inglis 51). The rise of the water closet allowed the middle classes to disavow their own waste, while working-class populations were denied access to sanitation. Walton reads this history through Foucault, arguing that faecal regulation was more so invested in the “self-affirmation of one class rather than the enslavement of another,” less about repressing the proletariat than about affirming bourgeois superiority (Foucault 123). Defecation became a form of capital—one more means of “separating the clean from the filthy,” thereby ruling them (56).
Walton’s reading of Marx alongside Hannah Arendt brings forth a crucial theoretical pivot; while the former emphasizes endless metabolic transformations between humans and nature, the latter distinguishes between labor and work. Drawing from Arendt, Walton sees labor as “cyclical, never-ending, ensuring survival in a metabolic relation to nature through feeding and maintaining physiological existence” while work “transforms material into durable objects” (64). She leverages this distinction, in conjunction with Arendt’s observation of the “gendered division of labour” in which “women perform most of the metabolic activity, and men, the work of world-making,” in order to foreground the gendered dimensions of metabolism (16). The gut, operating somewhere between autonomy and control, is rendered a site where this division is lived daily.
Walton’s chapter on the “second brain”—the enteric nervous system—pushes this argument inward. The gut, she shows, thinks. “A place where the world passes through us,” it operates semi-independently of conscious thought, governing timing, urgency, and release (89). Toilet training, or “the disciplining of the large intestine,” (92) emerges as the regulation not only of waste but also of time itself, which is rendered unidirectional in the “properly trained peristaltic system” that transforms “food into fuel and waste” (94). Children are trained to internalize schedules, regularity, and emotional restraint, producing what Walton calls a localized faecal habitus. Yet, as she discusses, “even the most assiduous adherence to a regular schedule would fail to systematise the baby’s bowels if the mother or nurse did not also learn to properly calibrate the emotional atmosphere that accompanied the training process” (98). The gut’s “own communicative agency” persists (103).
The book’s second half narrows its focus to women’s bodies, medicine, and pathology. Walton examines early twentieth-century surgical interventions for “intestinal stasis,” particularly those performed by Sir Arbuthnot Lane on predominantly female patients, whose intestines were, according to Lane, “just entirely more susceptible to being kinked” (114). Women’s bowels were pathologized, surgically “streamlined,” and linked to domestic efficiency (17); the body and the home were imagined “as one extended metabolic system” (122). In fact, “the overburdening of the intestines with faecal matter and the cluttering of household channels with things” became parallel failures of flow (126). Walton’s analysis makes clear how medical authority reinforced gender norms under the guise of hygiene and health.
The final three chapters present case studies in which peristalsis becomes overtly political. One such case centers Miss Louise K, a woman whose “erotic life is entirely hooked up with her peristaltic processes” (130). Her carefully orchestrated daily routines—including “preparatory fantasies, washing rituals, the positioning of her body at the correct distance from other bodies”— were interpreted as displaced erotic symptoms, ultimately folded into an Oedipal diagnosis framing her peristaltic practices as exemplary of developmental failure (131). Walton resists this pathologizing logic, arguing instead that such a “preoccupation with internal cleaning” was merely part of “the broader cultural emphasis on ‘inner hygiene’” (135). Read in this way, the case exposes the ease with which normative disciplinary pressures were considered to be individual psychic deviance, and underscores the complexity of “the brain/gut relation, especially when we consider that there is more than one ‘brain’ involved” (169).
A second case turns from psychoanalysis to medical observation, tracing Rosa Strosmann, whose digestive system appeared to refuse the forward progression of bodily time altogether by vomiting faecal matter. Faced with symptoms confounding conventional physiological explanation, her physician oscillated between documenting organic disturbance and suspecting psychogenic simulation. Walton reads this diagnostic slippage as profoundly gendered, revealing how women’s peristaltic noncompliance was repeatedly rendered intelligible through narratives of feminine unreliability.
The book culminates with a powerful chapter on suffragette hunger strikes, focusing on the case of Lady Constance Lytton, “an Englishwoman who, by joining with imprisoned hunger strikers, wilfully subtracts her own metabolic system from that of the British Empire, and explicitly defines this subtraction as a form of political discourse” (18). Walton invokes Ewa Ziarek, who emphasizes the hunger strike’s violence as one “inflicted on the self as a substitute target for political power” (Ziarek 162). The frequent result of forced feeding, Walton argues, represents “an instance of the (violent) biopolitics of regularity,” the state’s insistence that metabolism must continue on its terms (209). The gut is no longer metaphorically dissident—it is materially so.
In her conclusion, Walton brings faecal biopolitics into the present, examining sanitation inequalities in India and along the U.S.-Mexico border. Access to toilets, she illustrates, is never gender-neutral or apolitical. Women’s bodily schedules are constrained by safety, surveillance, and shame; sanitation becomes a site of governance, punishment, and resistance. The fantasy of “flush and forget,” which “most people in the developed world have come to enjoy as part of their taken-for-granted modern faecal habitus,” collapses under conditions of poverty, incarceration, and migration (233).
As a whole, Dissident Gut is a fundamentally and brilliantly unsettling book. Walton warns that to read it is to agree “to forgo, for some time at least, the bliss of peristaltic ignorance,” the comforting belief that bodily regularity is natural, private, and apolitical (259). What emerges instead is the insight that “where there is faecal habitus, there is also faecal injustice, and the need for faecal activism” (259). This “faecal activism,” as Walton demonstrates, includes the possibility—sometimes involuntary, sometimes deliberate—of metabolic dissent.
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Safer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958/1998.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley, New York: Vintage Books, 1980.
Inglis, David. A Sociological History of Excretory Experience: Defecatory Manners and Toiletry Technologies. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellon Press, 2001.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Ben Fowkes, vol. 1, New York: Penguin, 1976.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by David Fernbach, vol. 3, New York: Penguin, 1981.
Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Translated by M. Milligan, Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1988.
Walton, Jean. Dissident Gut: Technologies of Regularity, Politics of Revolt. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024.
Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska. Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.