{"product_id":"disgustatory-jeremy-tirrell-9780817322687","title":"Disgustatory!: A Gothic Rhetoric of Consumption","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eA critical exploration of how Gothic tropes infiltrate wellness discourse, revealing the rhetorical forces behind our cultural obsession with food, health, and bodily control.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eDisgustatory! A Gothic Rhetoric of Consumption\u003c\/i\u003e unearths the darkness behind modern obsessions with food, health, and bodily optimization. In this provocative and richly interdisciplinary work, Jeremy Tirrell and Kate Maddalena argue that contemporary discourses around food, medicine, and the body are steeped in Gothic rhetoric--where the promise of purity and control is shadowed by monstrosity, abjection, and the uncanny.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom Soylent and nootropics to probiotics and lab-grown meat, Tirrell and Maddalena show how wellness discourse is haunted by Gothic tropes: body horror, hybridity, and existential dread. Wellness culture, they argue, is not merely pseudoscience or fraud but a complex, persuasive rhetoric that blurs science and myth, purity and decay, medicine and mysticism.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eDisgustatory!\u003c\/i\u003e 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. Each chapter explores a rhetorical element--quantification, hybridity, abjection, optimization, and regulation--to show how food becomes a site of cultural anxiety and existential longing. This book will appeal to rhetoricians, scholars of science and technology studies, cultural theorists, and anyone interested in the strange intersections of health, horror, and persuasion.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Jeremy Tirrell,Kate Maddalena\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 081732268X\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780817322687\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e University Alabama Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 07\/15\/2026\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 310\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Hardcover","brand":"Jeremy Tirrell","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":48460205162751,"sku":"9780817322687","price":110.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_a523abbe-b1bd-46ed-b742-2cf313ed08e9.jpg?v=1777413382","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/disgustatory-jeremy-tirrell-9780817322687","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}