Kate Maddalena Releases a New Book with Jeremy Tirrell
This month, ICCIT Professor Kate Maddalena and her co-author Jeremy Tirrell have released Disgustatory! A Gothic Rhetoric of Consumption. Their new book, published by the University of Alabama Press, is a critical exploration of how Gothic tropes infiltrate wellness discourse, revealing the rhetorical forces behind our cultural obsession with food, health, and bodily control.
"Disgustatory! offers a fresh framework: a 'Gothic rhetoric of consumption' that explains why we are drawn to weird diets, digital detoxes, and miracle cures. Through case studies of strange substances and stranger practices—Reddit fasting rituals, magic dirt supplements, fecal transplants—Tirrell and Maddalena reveal how fear, fascination, and the fantasy of bodily control animate our health choices."
The two authors provided a sneak peak of their book this past March at Trip Out! Media and Altered States, the third annual ICCIT graduate-faculty research symposium (which Maddalena co-organized). More details about Disgustatory! are available on the publisher's website.
