From Visceral to the Aesthetic

2022

We recoil at the thought of eating rotten meat or moldy strawberries and feel uncomfortable with the bad breath of a person we do not specifically like. We may feel disgusted when Divine, one of the protagonists of John Waters’ film Pink Flamingos (1972) eats dog feces – or when Akwaeke Emezi, in her debut novel Freshwater (2018), describes how the protagonist, in veterinary school, mutilates cadavers, separates skin from muscle, and lifts “delicate sheets of fascia” with the scalpel (Emezi 2018, 41). Disgust is, alongside surprise, sadness, happiness, fear, anger, and contempt mentioned in the list of so-called universal emotions (Ekman 1970). It is often visualized as a wrinkled nose. Acc…