[khan]

IV. Disgust

We have gone a little further toward understanding the logic of these tortures, but not far enough. For the logic of colonial objectification, as I have sketched it, might be satisfied, indeed seems best satisfied, with abduction, rape as impregnation, and other well-known devices through which men at war establish their domination over the subject nation. But as Sarkar says, there is something dark and unusual about the Gujarat tortures, something suggesting obsession with the female body and especially its genital organs. Torture and abuse, particularly the insertion of large metal objects into the vagina and other forms of genital torture, play a dramatic and unusual role in these events. The feminist analysis of objectification shows why there would be no large barrier to using women’s bodies in these ways. But why would men inflict such tortures? The account of objectification does not help us answer this question. This Muslim woman–hating involves something more than mere doing as one wants with an instrumental object, more even than the desire to colonize the enemy’s domain and thus to inflict dishonor upon it. Although Defence Minister George Fernandes treated the rapes dismissively, as if they were nothing new, most witnesses disagreed.12 As one commentator writes, “The violence in Gujarat was different from earlier incidents of communal violence, both for the scale of the assaults and for the sheer sadism and brutality with which women and girls were victimized.”13 This new something, I would argue, is connected to the operations of disgust, an emotion that plays a key role not only in misogyny but in many types of racial hatred.14

Disgust plays a powerful role in human life. Through our strong aversive reactions to substances such as feces, decaying meat, corpses, and other bodily waste, we police the boundaries of our body from contamination every day. Disgust is distinct from distaste: the very same smell arouses different disgust reactions depending on the person’s conception of the object she is smelling. It is also distinct from the sense of danger, for many things are disgusting long after all danger is removed. Disgust is an emotion heavily caught up in symbolic and magical thinking. Its objects are reminders of our animality and mortality, either because they are in fact corpses or waste products or because they come through a process of association to symbolize waste, excrement, and mortality. Disgust works by shielding human beings from too much daily contact with aspects of their own humanity that are difficult to live with. Thus if we don’t touch corpses or oozy, decaying, smelly things, we may be able to ignore our own mortality. If we neatly dispose of our bodily waste products, we more easily forget that we are made of stuffs that end up on the dungheap.

It is not enough for human beings to protect themselves from contamination by the primary objects of disgust, such as feces and corpses. Humans also typically need a group of humans to bound themselves against, who come to symbolize the disgusting and who, therefore, insulate the community even further from its own animality. Thus, every society ascribes disgust properties—bad smell, stickiness, sliminess, foulness, decay—to some group of persons, who are therefore found disgusting and shunned, and who in this way further insulate the dominant group from what they fear facing in themselves. In many European societies Jews have played that role: they have been characterized as disgusting in those physical ways, and they have been represented symbolically as vermin who had those same properties. In the traditional Hindu caste hierarchy, dalits, formerly called “untouchables,” played a related role: through their contact with waste products they were regarded as themselves contaminated, thus not to be touched by the pure person; their very existence in the community shielded the pure from the decay and stench of their own animality. (But not from danger: Gandhi points out in his autobiography that during a cholera epidemic the lower castes, who defecated in the fields far from their dwellings, were less at risk of disease than the upper castes, who used the gutters outside their windows to dispose of waste.)

Projecting disgust onto another group subordinates the group. The group to whom disgust properties are ascribed exemplifies animality and thereby (in the eyes of the dominant group) lowness in contrast to the allegedly pure dominant ones. But because the subordination is inspired at root by anxiety and denial, it is not a peaceable subordination. Disgust minorities are not treated like nice household pets. Instead, the rage that people feel against their own mortality and animality is often enacted toward them, whether by humiliation or, in addition, by physical violence. At its extreme point the anxiety issues in projects of ethnic cleansing: if only we could completely rid ourselves of this group, the thinking goes, we would be free of our own death.

In virtually all cultures, women are among the groups to whom disgust properties are imputed. Portrayed as hyperanimal beings, receptacles of male bodily emissions as well as the fluids associated with menstruation and birth, women are portrayed as sticky, smelly, dirty, repellent. Taboos associated with menstruation and birth are but one sign of this ubiquitous construction. But there is a subtle difference between disgust toward Jews, say, and disgust toward women, for women are, to dominant males, sexually alluring as well as disgusting, and one of the alluring things about them is the fact that they exemplify the forbidden terrain of the hyperphysical, which is the disgusting.15 Men are revolted by the idea of their semen inside a woman’s vagina, and yet they can’t keep from wanting to put it there.16

In a brilliant analysis of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata,17 Andrea Dworkin argues that this fact about disgust toward women—that men can’t keep from wanting them and then feeling sullied and disgusted by them—undergirds objectification: as Tolstoy’s narrator says, he can’t see his wife as a person and an end as long as he sees her as this alluring disgusting thing that he needs to use for his pleasure. But this objectification takes a particularly violent turn. For the very understanding of dominant masculinity that makes all reminders of animality disgusting is deeply threatened by sexual desire for women. The man sees, in his desire, that he is not who he pretends to be: he is an animal wanting to exercise animal functions. This deep wound to his ego can only be salved by destroying the cause of his desire. Thus Tolstoy’s narrator has murdered his wife. Only after she is dead, he tells us, can he see her as a human being—because then he no longer desires her. Similarly, according to Dworkin, Tolstoy himself records in his diary violent repulsion and antagonism toward the young wife who tempts him out of his purity. Dworkin suggests that male desire is often, if not always, mingled in this way with the desire to violate and destroy.

Dworkin’s analysis of disgust misogyny would have been even stronger had she grounded it in a more general analysis of human disgust, but at any rate it is clear that she has identified a feature of misogynistic disgust that makes it (even) more violent than many other instances of disgust. My more general analysis suggests that disgust toward women of minorities already marked as animal is likely to be even more intense: thus Jewish women, in Nazi-era literature, were represented as hyperanimal and hypersexual beings, who exercised a fascinating allure but who must all the more resolutely be resisted by the pure German male, as he attempted to establish his purity and domination.