From Humanities & Social Sciences Communications last month…
Crip guts, stomas, and the violence of ‘returning to normal’: a feminist quer crip approach to the gut
Orla Murray https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-06091-1
Abstract:
What is a feminist quer crip approach to the gut? How might we use feminist quer crip theory to make sense of non-normative guts? And how might crip guts help us make sense of the world? This paper is an autoethnographic reflection on my crip guts, specifically being diagnosed with ulcerative colitis (UC), a form of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and having a colectomy (surgery to remove my colon) to create an ileostomy (a type of stoma). I consider the epistemic complexities of being both patient and researcher and the importance of acknowledging multiple forms of expertise, putting my autoethnographic reflections into conversation with a variety of texts.
I argue that my crip guts provide an embodied, if stigmatised, form of knowledge that complicates academic/lived experience and body/mind divisions, alongside necessitating more holistic responses to crip guts beyond individualising biomedical models. I examine the violence of discourses of normality around bodily difference and the complex temporalities of the gut through a focus three key moments in my crip gut experience – late diagnosis and (not) being believed; stoma representation and stigmatised imagined futures; and, the gut remembering colonial pasts – before arguing for quer stoma pride as a destigmatised collective refusal of normative gut discourse and valuation of crip gut knowing.
Ye gods and little fishes! This it “Totally OT,” not “Semi-OT.” I’m leaving it here in case someone is interested – which, knowing the METARs, I can’t believe except for an opportunity for satire.
All our guts remember colonial pasts. You took the liberty to add quer.
The author was very clear up front stating that the paper is an autoethnographic reflection…not intended to be quantitatively scientific. No need to clown on her or point out that it isn’t hard science…she’d agree with you.
Back to our colonial remembering guts - More and more researchers are studying the effects of ancestral trauma on intergenerational mental health. It’s been shown that trauma can alter gene expression. That means that trauma experienced by our ancestors can impact later generations. Whoa…
Taking it to the gut - the brain-gut axis is a thing. Again, researchers are just beginning to understand how this works. That means that ancestral trauma can impact other areas of our health, apart from mental health. Double whoa…
Bringing us on topic - better understanding of how trauma affects gene expression can lead to new and exciting treatments for mental health and physical health conditions.
“…stoma representation and stigmatised imagined futures; and, the gut remembering colonial pasts – before arguing for quer stoma pride as a destigmatised collective refusal of normative gut discourse…”
The semi part is because it is representative of what a number of highly educated, intelligent people use their education for. Remember the nearly two-thirds of people who thought college was not worth the cost?
Another side effect of insulin resistance deemed by the medical profession to be incurable. Lose weight, get rid of insulin resistance, and magically ulcerative colitis (UC) disappears.
No it’s not……unless it’s due to some strong genetic predisposition or secondary to other conditions that are totally unrelated to overeating, oversitting, and the overfatness that’s related to either/both.
In fact, the medical profession is pretty darn confident that it’s totally preventable in the first place by not eating/sitting too much. Even with there being a diminishing supply of examples to demonstrate this.
Sure…let’s all swap the words around and pretend it doesn’t change context!
I examine the pride of discourses of normality around bodily difference refusal and the complex temporalities of the gut through a focus three key moments in my crip gut experience – late diagnosis and (not) being believed; stoma representation and stigmatised imagined futures; and, the gut remembering normative pasts – before arguing for quer stoma pride as a destigmatised collective knowing of colonial normative gut discourse and valuation of crip gut violence.
This is why a college education is important. The science says insulin resistance can not only be stopped, it can be reversed. But right wing media tells people to distrust science. This leaves people confused about the correct course of action even when the evidence is overwhelming.
The problem is that medicine treats symptoms, not causes. Only near the end of his career did my cardiologist hire a dietician for his clinic. I consulted with her and my diagnostic was that she was mostly interested in selling her cookbooks. I did buy both of them and now I realise that neither tackled the root cause of unhealthy modern diets, junk food!
Even if “science” says that “insulin resistance can be stopped and even reversed” the problem is that practicing doctors don’t have all the facts at hand, their education is not complete, they are specialists, very good at their specialty.
My doctor prescribed a life saving drug that saved my life in Trinidad, Isordil, 5mg, dinitrato de isororbide. That was 25 years ago and I still carry them with me as a magical charm.
The evidence might be overwhelming but it is not in the right places where it can be useful. In my view the problem is in education, knowedge not being where it is useful.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a lack of a college education or even the effects of political persuasion by the media, but rather poorly developed critical thinking skills. Specifically, the tool set that allows us to overcome our personal biases when evaluating information outside of our own area of expertise.
I couldn’t be bothered wading through the gibberish contained in the OP, so I can’t speak to that particular opinion. FWIW, I treat the “hard science” publications containing technical terms outside of my knowledge base/skill set similarly…..too many “neologisms” in one sentence tells me I’m drifting outside my lane and into the realms of Big Bamboozle/”AI overview” (I’d sooner be underinformed and aware than misinformed and not…..if TMF still had the personal quote feature in our bios, I reckon this would replace my old one of “The more I learn, the less I seem to know”)
What are you talking about? Maybe I’m picking a nit, but you misquoted the abstract in your italicized snarky comment and clearly don’t understand what the paper is about.
I’m not suggesting the article is worth reading or understanding. It seems you would agree that it’s not worthy. It’s interesting that you went out of your way to create a post about it, and chose to disrespect the subject and author. I wonder why that is.
I did not find it informative (as it had no actual content, and I had already encountered my first of far too many pseudo-academic poseur authors 55 years ago), nor amusing (bleh, so boring, so predictably stupifyingly obeying its private arcane cultic sense of unhappy daily life seen from its angry stunted crabbed angle), nor community building (like bringing a bag of fleas to a cocktail party).
For balance perhaps I should go and dredge up from parallel lumps from some misogynistic right wing sump pit connected with the Heritage Foundation?
I remember the “Sokal affair” 30 years ago. From Wiki:
…would publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions."
… Sokal said he was inspired to submit the bogus article after reading Higher Superstition (1994), in which authors Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt claim that some humanities journals will publish anything as long as it has “the proper leftist thought” and quoted (or was written by) well-known leftist thinkers.
Oh, me too! I adored the skill and horror of it all! It was a brilliant proof of the intensity of B.S. fueled pseudo-intellectualism in the USA, especially on the academic left.
Oh yes, leftist loonie one-up-man-ship preening has been bleeding sensible politics for far too long. Similar idiocy, albeit in smaller volumes, plagued conservative journals as well, usually using Christian idiocies instead of late Marxist ones.
I HATE and DETEST them all.
**When the Sokal affair “came out” (LOL) I was the owner publisher of multiple magazines, including the Advocate, and had an editorial staff that sought out and exterminated such junk like the professional experts they were. Their type is almost extinct.
The Advocate The Advocate (magazine) - Wikipedia was the crux journal of record for the gay rights movement during the vicious onslaughts against us by the evilly mutating “Relgious Right” and its political adherents from Reagan (who was privately quite sane on the issue) through to the present, starring the predicaments of the Speaker of the House and other GOPsters.
"There once was an abstract from h3ll.
With all the big words it could spell.
It bamboozled the board,
Till the reviewers all roared,
“This is bullpoo—just ring the dam bell!”