DISGUSTING!

Martha Nussbaum is suddenly the legal/religious thinker du jour, a writer of such fearlessness and logical clarity that she takes on the really impossible subjects without flinching.  At the moment Gerald Fetz on the Montana Humanities Roundtable is trying to get a reading discussion going, based on her book called “Not for Profit.”  The subject is  really why we are discarding the arts/humanities, but so far everyone is mostly praising each other and the humanities.  Kim Anderson has doubts but is not expressing them yet.

I’m reading Nussbaum's “From Disgust to Humanities: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law.”  She’s a very clear writer, but it’s probably easier to get a sense of her thought by watching YouTube videos of her.  This book is part of a series from Oxford University Press and she was asked to write it.  Her ideas of disgust come in large part from thinking about untouchables in India, who were originally “untouchable” because they handled excrement and the dead, among other “lowly” and repetitious jobs.  Now that even much of India has proper plumbing, the names identified in the public mind as “untouchables” remain a stigma.  There is even more disapproval of people who change their names.

The basic idea is that considering the nature of some people to be “disgusting” is a way of controlling them, keeping them in their place.  Though it seems as though the objectionable qualities are objective descriptions, justified in the public mind by associating them with nastiness like excrement, stink, bugs, ooze, slime, disease  (J.K. Rowling’s “mud people”) , it often becomes obvious that calling them disgusting is a prelude to treating them like animals, excluding them, beating up on them, defunding them, and -- in the most extreme -- herding them into the prison camps and gas chambers of the Holocaust.  Retarded and otherwise disabled or crippled people, gypsies, gays, Jews, dissidents, and so on were all considered “disgusting” and therefore their extermination could be called “cleansing.”

My own most vivid witness has been to the stigmatizing of Native Americans and part of the counter-battle has been getting tribal children to give up their internalized self-definition of “disgusting.”  Missionaries of various kinds used this to force change in the lives of tribal people.  They combined the “cleansing” idea of baptism with the “cleansing” of eternal fire in the Afterlife and linked two words into a phrase I still hear:  “dirty Indians.”  The push-back, both by Indians themselves and by guilt-stricken idealists (mostly back East), was to make them so ethereally noble that they were hardly physical, defined as spiritual beings with connections to Another World.  

In the practical world, a stigmatized person is thought to deserve punishment for the original sin of being dark-skinned or poor.  A couple of decades ago an enrolled Blackfeet drunk (oh, disgusting!) pestered around a bar until the bar owner simply shot him dead.  The tribal people started out being indignant but pretty soon they drifted back to the bar, saying that the drunk asked for it with his disgusting behavior.  Times have changed.  Not long ago three brothers who liked violence picked out what they thought was a likely victim in the parking lot of a bar at quitting time: a drunk Indian ranch hand.  But in the middle of their melee, another Indian -- a tribal council member and his wife -- tried to stop it, so the fun-lovers turned their fists and boots on them.  The interveners  were not powerless.  They knew how to use the law.  The brothers are serving jail time.  But even the tribal council member was accused of the disgusting practice of hanging around in a bar until closing time.

Following the example of blacks who resent the n-word and find that forbidding it is a powerful weapon in resisting disgust, some years ago the word “squaw” was fingered as a vehicle of disgust.  The associations with the word “squaw” had come to be pejorative: a squat, dark, old, dirty, possibly infected woman with no powerful husband who could legitimately be used by men as convenient and then discarded or killed.  Evidence is in the newspapers and police dossiers across both the United States and Canada.  (I suspect in Mexico as well.)  “Squaw” is considered by some to be equivalent to “whore”, not least because poverty and social disorder (as is often seen on reservations) is one source of sex workers.  Some of them have learned to be dangerous themselves.

Respectable Indian women who know how to use the system came to the conclusion that eliminating the epithet “squaw” -- which is scattered over all the maps of the continent as thickly as the words “willow,” “beaver” and “deer” -- would get rid of the stigma.  It did get rid of a lot of old maps and a lot of money necessary to rename everything on new maps.  This deed was done in part because of the conviction that “squaw” meant “cunt,” which is a forbidden dirty, slimy, disgusting word.  (Scholarship showed that “squaw” did NOT mean sexual parts but rather gender, which is as much a social role as an anatomical part.  A hard distinction to grasp.)  And this took the conversation to the familiar white man conviction that women in general are basically disgusting.  

Compare other epithets for Indian people:  “buck” or “papoose.”  Papoose is close to the European ‘puppet” or doll, making an Indian child less of a real human family member.  (Compare "pickaninny.")  “Buck” has implications of sexual potency and physical strength.  Those word-inventing men (because they wrote) boasted, half-sheepish/half-proud, “when I was a young buck,” meaning “when I got into fights, had adventures, and prowled for women.”  Like a dark-skinned man.  “Before I became civilized.”  Unlike that Indian buck idling on the porch.

Today’s civilized people do not use such words.  They come from hierarchal assumptions based on the European empires, particularly the English, who used stigma to control their subject countries.  But contemporary Native American people must still emphasize their professional, educated, and meticulously conventional qualities in order to get respect.  Even the school children respond to the advertising-driven obsession with cleanliness, not smelling, “proper” clothes and other appearance markers that are meant to prevent disgust.

But then a curious wave of resistance is always in such situations, used by those who either make victimhood into an entitlement or those who embrace the disgustingness with slogans, markers of the ghetto, flaunting sexuality of every kind, and shouting words used as markers, not just of filthiness but also of sex and evil.  

It is so powerful a kind of terrorism that it can drive the missionary-minded, empire-seeking, power-invested, domination-obsessed into apoplectic violence.  The law must deal with it constantly.  Literature and art address it everywhere.  But the academic “humanities” people are afraid to, which is why they’ve become irrelevant.  Except that they are now part of the problem, defining every nonconformity as “disgusting.”  Or to use their phrase, “so ugly.”