Disgust

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "Well, and how did that jolly evening come to an end?" "Drinks had been ordered—beer, spirits, and some bottles of frothy stuff, yclept champagne, which surely was not the produce of the sunny vines of France, but of which the women imbibed copiously. "After this, not wishing us to leave the house without having been entertained in some way or other, and to get a few more francs out of our pockets, they proposed to shew us some tricks that they could do amongst themselves. "It was apparently a rare sight, and the one for which we had come to this house. My friends acquiesced unanimously. Thereupon the old bladder of fat undressed herself stark naked, and shook her buttocks in a kind of poor imitation of the Eastern Dance of the Wasp. The poor consumptive wretch followed her example, and slipped off her dress by a simple shake of her body. "At the sight of that huge mass of flabby hog's lard flapping on either side of the rump, the thin whore lifted up her hand, and gave her friend a smart slap on the buttocks, but the hand seemed to sink in it, as into a mass of butter. "'Ah!' said the cantinière; 'this is the little game you like, is it?' "And she answered the blow by a smarter one on her friend's backside. "Thereupon the consumptive girl began to run round the room, and the cantinière toddled after her in the most provoking attitude, each trying to slap the other. "As the old prostitute passed Biou, he gave her a loud smack with his open palm, and soon after, most of the other students followed suit, evidently much excited by this little game of flagellation, until the buttocks of the two women were of a crimson red. "The cantinière having at last managed to seize her friend, she sat down, and laid her across her knees, saying, 'Now, my friend, you will get it to your heart's content.' "And suiting the action to the words, she belaboured her soundly; that is, striking her as strongly as her chubby little hands allowed her. "The young woman having at last succeeded in getting up, both the women thereupon began to kiss and fondle each other. Then, with thighs against thighs and breasts against breasts, they stood a moment in that position; after which, they brushed aside the bushy hair that covered the lower part of the so-called Mount of Venus, and opening their thick brown and bulgy lips, they placed one clitoris in contact with the other, and these as they touched wagged with delight; then, encircling their arms round each other's backs, with their mouths close together, breathing each other's fetid breath, the one sucking alternately the other's tongue, they began to rub mightily together.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  más en la habitación. Me toma un momento registrarlo, pero luego el alivio me inunda, y llevo mi mano hacia atrás, atrayéndola hacia mí. Jordan. Pero luego frunzo el ceño, mi corazón martilleando mientras el Heavenly de Victoria's Secret recorre mis fosas nasales, y siento una pierna que no tiene las mismas curvas y el mismo tono que he llegado a ansiar todos los días. —¿Qué demonios? Arranco las sábanas y enciendo la lámpara, sentándome y mirando a Lindsay. Está usando un camisón de seda rojo. ¿Qué diablos cree que está haciendo? —¿En serio? —Me mira sorprendida, como si esa no fuera la reacción que esperaba—. No pretendas que no recuerdas la rutina, Pike. Cuando algo seguro aparece medio desnudo y caliente en tu cama, no lo rechazas. Se inclina, presionando su cuerpo contra el mío y yendo por mi cuello con su boca. —Detente. —Me levanto de la cama y tomo mis jeans de la silla, poniéndomelos—. No estoy tan jodidamente desesperado. —No tiene por qué ser así, Pike. —Suspira, se desliza más cerca de rodillas y se coloca el cabello oscuro detrás de la oreja—. Era joven, estúpida y egoísta — suplica—. No vi lo buen hombre que eres. Lo afortunada que fui al tener a alguien ambicioso, responsable y estable. Te quiero. —Ladea la cabeza, jugando con sus ojos—. No fue del todo malo. Lo recuerdas, ¿verdad? Recuerdas lo ardiente que éramos. Busco en el cajón de mi mesita de noche, viendo la nueva caja de condones que tuve que comprar, porque Jordan y yo pasamos por la última más rápido de lo que esperaba. Rápidamente saco un cigarro de la caja y el encendedor y cierro el cajón, para que Lindsay no lo vea y empiece a ser entrometida. —No tenía mucho de un marco de referencia en ese momento —escupo—. Ahora sí. —Estás solo —afirma—. Quiero intentarlo de nuevo. Por el amor de Cole. ¿Sabes cuánto le gustaría vernos juntos? Era demasiado joven para recordar. Sin embargo, saber eso no me impide desearla, extrañarla y necesitarla. La cama se hunde detrás de mí, y parpadeo, dándome cuenta que hay alguien Saltando, vuelvo la cabeza y veo un contorno familiar a mi lado pero no el que quiero.

• From Delta of Venus (1977)

  There was one very wild boy who looked like a little Moorish prince, black-faced, with noble features, a royal carriage, and a beautiful body so smooth that no bones ever showed, lean and polished as a statue. This boy rebelled against the customary wearing of nightgowns. He was used to sleeping naked and the nightgown choked him, stifled him. So every night he put it on like the other boys, and then he would secretly take it off under his covers, and finally fall asleep without it. Every night the old Jesuit would make his rounds, watching that no boy visited another in his bed, or masturbated, or talked in the dark to his neighbor. When he reached the bed of the undisciplined one, he would slowly and cautiously lift the cover and look at his naked body. If the boy awakened he would scold him. “I came to see if you were sleeping without a nightgown again!” But if the boy did not awaken he was content with a long lingering glance at the youthful body asleep. Once during anatomy class when he stood on the teacher’s platform, and the girlish blond boy sat staring at him, the prominence under his priest’s robe became obvious to everyone. He asked the blond boy, “How many bones does man have in his body?” The blond boy answered meekly, “Two hundred and eight.” Another boy’s voice came from the back of the classroom, “But Father Dobo has two hundred and nine!” It was soon after this incident that the boys were taken on a botanical excursion. Ten of them lost their way. Among them was the delicate blond boy. They found themselves in a forest, far from the teachers and the rest of the school. They sat down to rest and decide upon a course of action. They began eating berries. How it began, no one knew, but after a while the blond boy was thrown on the grass, undressed, turned on his stomach, and the other nine boys all passed over him, taking him as they would a prostitute, brutally. The experienced boys penetrated his anus to satisfy their desire, while the less experienced used friction between the legs of the boy, whose skin was as tender as a woman’s. They spat on their hands and rubbed saliva over their penises. The blond boy screamed and kicked and wept, but they all held him and used him until they were satiated. [image file=image_rsrc1RD.jpg] The RingIn Peru it is the custom among the Indians to exchange rings for a betrothal, rings that have been in their possession for a long time. These rings are sometimes in the shape of a chain. A very handsome Indian fell in love with a Peruvian woman of Spanish descent, but there was violent opposition on the part of her family. The Indians were purported to be lazy and degenerate, and to produce weak and unstable children, particularly when married to Spanish blood.

• From Delta of Venus (1977)

  One little girl was about ten, the other twelve. They were both beautiful, with huge velvet-black eyes, long silky hair and golden skin. They wore short white dresses and short white socks. Shrieking, the two little girls would run into the Baron’s room and playfully throw themselves over his big bed. He would tease them, fondle them. Now the Baron, like many men, always awakened with a peculiarly sensitive condition of the penis. In fact, he was in a most vulnerable state. He had no time to rise and calm the condition by urinating. Before he could do this the two little girls had run across the shining floor and thrown themselves over him, and over his prominent penis, which the big pale blue quilt somewhat concealed. The little girls did not mind how their skirts flew upward and their slender dancer’s legs got tangled and fell over his penis lying straight in the quilt. Laughing, they turned over on him, sat on him, treated him like a horse, sat astride him and pushed down on him, urging him to swing the bed by a motion of his body. With all this, they would kiss him, pull at his hair, and have childish conversations. The Baron’s delight in being so treated would grow into excruciating suspense. One of the girls was lying on her stomach, and all he had to do was to move a little against her to reach his pleasure. So he did this playfully, as if he meant to finally push her off the bed. He said, “I am sure you will fall off if I push this way.” “I won’t fall off,” said the little girl, holding on to him through the covers while he moved as if he would force her to roll over the side of the bed. Laughing, he pushed her body up, but she lay close to him, her little legs, her little panties, everything, rubbing against him in her effort not to slide off, and he continued his antics while they laughed. Then the second girl, wishing to even the strength of the game, sat astride him in front of the other one, and now he could move even more wildly with the weight of both on him. His penis, hidden in the thick quilt, rose over and over again between the little legs, and it was like this that he came, with a strength he had rarely known, surrendering the battle, which the girls had won in a manner they never suspected.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Dejo escapar una risa amarga. Y gracias a Dios por eso. Llegar a casa después de un turno doble y desembolsar sesenta dólares a una niñera antes de pasar el resto de la noche durmiendo una hora cuando podía, entre las horas de alimentación de Cole mientras ella estaba de fiesta. —¿No estás cansado de salir solo? —Se levanta de la cama y se acerca a mí—. ¿Ver a todos nuestros amigos con sus familias, hogares y vacaciones? Podemos ser eso. Crecí. Podría estar aquí para ti, cuidándote y cuidando esta casa. Esta casa. Se refiere a nuestra casa. Quiere vivir aquí. La idea de ella en mi casa, caminando como si fuera suya, me enferma. Esta no es su casa. Nunca será de ella. Es... Me detengo, sin necesidad de poner el pensamiento en palabras. Solo veo una mujer viviendo en esta casa. Camino hacia la puerta. —Y, déjame adivinar... a cambio, te apoyaría financieramente en este arreglo, ¿verdad? —Podría hacerte feliz —me dice—. Lo hice antes. Dejo caer los ojos, apenas necesitando reflexionar sobre esa afirmación. Hace un mes, pude haber estado de acuerdo con ella. Hubo una vez, durante un breve período de tiempo, que fuimos felices. Días aquí, horas allá. Pero ahora lo sé, ni siquiera se acercó. Ni siquiera se compara con lo que he tenido en las últimas semanas. —Vuelve a tu habitación. —Salgo, dejando la puerta abierta y luego agregando sobre mi hombro—. Quiero decir, a la habitación de Jordan. Corro por el pasillo, disminuyendo la velocidad cuando paso frente a la puerta de Cole y tan jodidamente tentado de abrirla. Eso allí es mío. ¿Qué clase de hombre pone a su mujer en esa situación? ¿Qué clase de hombre no confiesa y toma lo que es suyo? Necesito pensar. Bajo corriendo las escaleras y me dirijo a la cocina y luego al cuarto de lavandería, cada momento que espero me acerca cada vez más a no poder soportar esto. Sé que no dejará que pase nada, pero la necesito fuera de allí. Pero en cuanto salgo, veo que el problema ya está resuelto. Por el momento, de todos modos. Está sentada en el borde de la piscina, con las piernas colgando en el agua, y me mira cuando salgo. Me detengo momentáneamente, sus ojos azules fríos y distantes. La conciencia me pincha la espalda, sabiendo que la habitación de Lindsay —la habitación de

• From City of Night (1963)

  The next day he took me to a Turkish bath, to meet the man he had mentioned. The bath is in one of the seamier sections of the city—down a flight of gray stairs, leading to a small booth where customers pay to get in. I had walked through this area before—one of the hustling bars is nearby—but I had never realized there was such a place: It is almost hidden, gobbled by the other buildings on the street and then it sinks underground. To get to it, you have to know it’s here. Behind the registration booth, a short squat, muscular man of about 40 is working on a ledgerbook. Hes wearing a T-shirt. His arms are covered with a thick mat of black hair, and he looks like a wrestler. “This is the kid I told you about,” Buzz said to him. “Wait for me in the lounge,” the squat man said peremptorily. In the lounge were several couches—a coke machine in one corner, several doors leading to other sections: to a row of whitedoored cubicles, the steam room, the head, the showers. It was not a wellkept place, although it appeared superficially clean. Even the lights were grayish. It looked improvised, as if someone, deciding to open a bath, had merely adapted whatever was readily, cheaply, and most concealedly available. As I sit there with Buzz, several men walk from one door into another, glancing at us: the customers—older men, starved-eyed youngmen—in towels, the attendants in sweatpants. I notice how different each of the attendants Ive seen (and they all spoke familiarly to Buzz) is from the other—markedly dissimilar as if carefully selected as to type. Im struck by the atmosphere of overwhelming debauchery here—beyond the feeling of the streets and the bars: a fantastic apparent anonymity as the various attendants and clients move about, somehow like shadows, lifeless manikin people.... It was as if what revealed itself on the streets and some bars as at least wild, alive determination had reduced itself here to its rockbasis, a cold, unquestioned, unquestioning Availability. The squat man appeared. “We can talk better back here,” he said, leading us into a small room lined with shelves on which are stacks of clean towels. “Im sorry I kept you waiting. One of my helpers—I told you—” he said to Buzz “—he left abruptly—just didnt show up.” His voice was incongruous with the rest of him. He spoke clearly, precisely. He has put on a pair of black-rimmed glasses and now resembles someone trying to look like an aloof businessman. He stares penetratingly at me. Already I dislike him. “Do you have a record—other than just being rousted?” he asked me. “Why?” I asked him. “Because I cant hire anyone with a record,” he said impatiently. “Hire?” I asked. The squat man turns to Buzz exasperatedly. “Didnt you tell him?” “Just that I wanted him to meet you,” Buzz says.

• From City of Night (1963)

  “Yes,” he answered proudly. “I wear it only on Special occasions.” But a note of nervousness entered his voice as he said: “Today I went to an Execution.” I blinked incredulously. “Yes,” he repeated with bravado—but he appears even more nervous now. “You heard right: An Execution! If you had been here, you could have witnessed it. My cat—remember the furry one?—he was becoming too weak—constantly simpering, whining. I hate weakness. I despise it. I loathe it... So I executed him.” “You put on that Nazi costume and you—?” I started. “Yes! And I Exterminated him—as all weakness must be Exterminated!... I put that cat out of his absurd sniveling misery!” He went on deliberately: “I put him in a bag. I drowned him in the bathtub!” As soon as hes verbalized what hes done, he appears visibly shaken, as if an emotional rubberband had been stretched to the point of snapping. I felt violently sick.... The black uniform now being hung adoringly in the closet... the flushed face... the pitiful lumpy body covered with the absurd clothes... the terrifying words.... The dummies gazing blankly.... Noticing that I was staring at him with undisguised contempt; surprised to see it so coldly aimed at him; realizing all at once that he had misinterpreted my returning here—and looking tense as if my look of disgust had thrown him unexpectedly off-balance—he blurted: “There is no excuse for weakness!... Once you allow yourself to be touched by it, youre lost!... And you may think—like that insidious Carl!—that it’s weakness to do—to do the things I do. But remember the importance of Seduction! The Leader of every cause has to set an example, whatever form that takes! He has to show The Way!” I want to tell him what I see so clearly. I want to say: “Youve rationalized your masochism—masking your own very real weakness.” But I merely stare at the posed obdurate face, chin thrust out like the caricature of a repugnant dictator—but a very uncertain dictator somehow. “You killed that cat,” I said finally—still not really believing it; rather, not wanting to. He sighed wearily. The enormity of what hes done seems slowly to be dawning on him. But he fights back, shaking his head: “Once you let weakness touch you—...” he starts; and his whole body begins to tremble instantly, as if his jangled nerves were out of control, rebelling against him. He shook his head as if he were very, very, very tired. And then he erupted:

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  61 Significantly, Kristeva’s discussion of abjection in Powers of Horror begins to suggest the uses of this structuralist notion of a boundary-constituting taboo for the purposes of constructing a discrete subject through exclusion. 62 The “abject” designates that which has been expelled from the body, discharged as excrement, literally rendered “Other.” This appears as an expulsion of alien elements, but the alien is effectively established through this expulsion. The construction of the “not-me” as the abject establishes the boundaries of the body which are also the first contours of the subject. Kristeva writes: nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. “I” want none of that element, sign of their desire; “I” do not want to listen, “I” do not assimilate it, “I” expel it. But since the food is not an “other” for “me,” who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself. 63 The boundary of the body as well as well as the distinction between internal and external is established through the ejection and transvaluation of something originally part of identity into a defiling otherness. As Iris Young has suggested in her use of Kristeva to understand sexism, homophobia, and racism, the repudiation of bodies for their sex, sexuality, and/or color is an “expulsion” followed by a “repulsion” that founds and consolidates culturally hegemonic identities along sex/race/sexuality axes of diferentiation. 64 Young’s appropriation of Kristeva shows how the operation of repulsion can consolidate “identities” founded on the instituting of the “Other” or a set of Others through exclusion and domination. What constitutes through division the “inner” and “outer” worlds of the subject is a border and boundary tenuously maintained for the purposes of social regulation and control. The boundary between the inner and outer is confounded by those excremental passages in which the inner effectively becomes outer, and this excreting function becomes, as it were, the model by which other forms of identity-differentiation are accomplished. In effect, this is the mode by which Others become shit. For inner and outer worlds to remain utterly distinct, the entire surface of the body would have to achieve an impossible impermeability. This sealing of its surfaces would constitute the seamless boundary of the subject; but this enclosure would invariably be exploded by precisely that excremental filth that it fears. Regardless of the compelling metaphors of the spatial distinctions of inner and outer, they remain linguistic terms that facilitate and articulate a set of fantasies, feared and desired. “Inner” and “outer” make sense only with reference to a mediating boundary that strives for stability. And this stability, this coherence, is determined in large part by cultural orders that sanction the subject and compel its differentiation from the abject. Hence, “inner” and “outer” constitute a binary distinction that stabilizes and consolidates the coherent subject.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  “Mom, Uncle Stanley is behaving inappropriately,” I said. “Oh, you’re probably imagining it,” she said. “He groped me! And he’s wanking off!” Mom cocked her head and looked concerned. “Poor Stanley,” she said. “He’s so lonely.” “But it was gross!” Mom asked me if I was okay. I shrugged and nodded. “Well, there you go,” she said. She said that sexual assault was a crime of perception. “If you don’t think you’re hurt, then you aren’t,” she said. “So many women make such a big deal out of these things. But you’re stronger than that.” She went back to her crossword puzzle. After that, I refused to go back to Grandpa’s. Being strong was fine, but the last thing I needed was Uncle Stanley thinking I was coming back for more of his fooling around. I did whatever it took to wash myself at Little Hobart Street. In the kitchen, we had an aluminum tub you could fit into if you pulled your legs up against your chest. By then the weather was warm enough to fill the tub with water from the tap under the house and bathe in the kitchen. After the bath, I crouched by the side of the tub and dipped my head in the water and washed my hair. But lugging all those buckets of water up to the house was hard work, and I would put off bathing until I was feeling pretty gamy. • • • In the spring, the rains came, drenching the valley for days in sheets of falling water. The water ran down the hillside gullies, pulling rocks and small trees with it, and spilled across the roads, tearing off chunks of asphalt. It gushed into the creeks, which swelled up and turned a foaming light brown, like a chocolate milk shake. The creeks emptied into the Tug, which overflowed its banks and flooded the houses and stores along McDowell Street. Mud was four feet deep in some houses, and folks’ pickups and mobile homes were swept away. Over in Buffalo Creek Hollow, a mine impoundment gave way, and a wave of black water thirty feet high killed 126 people. Mom said that this was how nature took her revenge on men who raped and pillaged the land, ruining nature’s own drainage system by clear-cutting forests and strip-mining mountains. Little Hobart Street was too high up in the hollow to get any flooding, but the rain washed parts of the road into the yards of the people who lived below us. The water also ate away some of the soil from around the pillars holding up our house, making it even more precarious. The hole in the kitchen ceiling widened, and then the ceiling on Brian and Maureen’s side of the bedroom started leaking. Brian had the top bunk, and when it rained, he’d spread a tarp over himself to keep the dripping water off. Everything in the house was damp.

• From Delta of Venus (1977)

  They walked in silence through the little streets of Chinatown. Women from all over the world smiled at them from open windows, stood on the doorsteps inviting them in. Some of the rooms were exposed to the street. Only a curtain concealed the beds. One could see couples embracing. There were Syrian women wearing their native costume, Arabian women with jewelry covering their half-naked bodies, Japanese and Chinese women beckoning slyly, big African women squatting in circles, chatting together. One house was filled with French whores wearing short pink chemises and knitting and sewing as if they were at home. They always hailed the passers-by with promises of specialities. The houses were small, dimly lit, dusty, foggy with smoke, filled with dusky voices, the murmurs of drunkards, of lovemaking. The Chinese adorned the setting and made it more confused with screens and curtains, lanterns, burning incense, Buddhas of gold. It was a maze of jewels, paper flowers, silk hangings, and rugs, with women as varied as the designs and colors, inviting men who passed by to sleep with them. It was in this quarter that Antonio had a room. He took Mathilde up the shabby stairway, opened a door that was almost worn away, and pushed her in. There was no furniture in it. On the floor there was a Chinese mat, and on this lay a man in rags, a man so gaunt, so diseased-looking, that Mathilde drew back. “Oh, you’re here,” said Antonio rather irritably. “I had nowhere to go.” “You can’t stay here you know. The police are after you.” “Yes, I know.” “I suppose you’re the one who stole that cocaine the other day? I knew it must be you.” “Yes,” the man talked sleepily, indifferently. Then Mathilde saw that his body was covered with scratches and small wounds. The man made an effort to sit up. He held an ampoule in one hand, in the other hand, a fountain pen and a penknife. She watched him with horror. He broke the top of the ampoule with his finger, shaking off the broken bits. Then, instead of inserting a hypodermic syringe, he inserted the fountain pen and drew the liquid out. With his penknife he made a slit in his arm that was already covered with old wounds and more recent ones, and in this slit he inserted the fountain pen and pushed the cocaine into his flesh. “He’s too poor to get an injection needle,” said Antonio. “And I did not give money to him because I thought I could save him from stealing it. But that’s what he has found to do.” Mathilde wanted to go. But Antonio would not let her. He wanted her to take cocaine with him. The man was lying back with his eyes closed. Antonio took out a needle and gave Mathilde an injection.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  A man then turns his mouth into a public toilet, a sink into which is poured the filth of alcohol; then he spews it out again. The apostle has recorded his lament. ‘Many are walking on this earth,’ he said, ‘who are enemies of Christ crucified. I tell you this in sorrow. Their fate is death everlasting. If their belly is their god, they will be condemned.’ Belly! Stomach! Words for a stinking bag of flesh, filled with shit and corrupted filth. From either end comes a foul wind. Sustenance is found for you at great cost and hard labour. The cooks have to grind and pound and mince, turning one dish into the likeness of another, just to satisfy you. They have to extract the marrow from the bones, just so that you can swallow the sweetest juices. They have to concoct spices out of herbs and leaves, so that they can make a sauce to stir your appetite. Yet you who live for such delights are as good as dead. Your vices have killed you. Drunkenness is just as foul a sin. Alcohol provokes violence and creates misery. It sours the breath. It disfigures the features. Who would want to embrace a drunk? He snores loudly, and mutters broken words. Oh you drunkard, you fall down as heavily as a stuck pig. You have lost your tongue, as well as your self-respect. Drunkenness is the graveyard of intelligence and decency. Never trust a man who is lost in drink. Never confide in him. So, good people, keep away from the red and the white wines that are sold in Fish Street and Cheapside. Spanish wine is the cheapest and the worst. It seems to get mixed up with other wines, until it becomes quite overpowering. Its vapours go straight to the head. I do not blame the vintners for this, of course. God forbid. My father was a vintner. It must happen naturally somehow. Two or three glasses are enough. The drunkard may then think he is at home in London, but in fact he has been transported to a vineyard in Spain. He is lying among the grapes, burbling nonsense. So, lords and ladies, listen to me. All of the great deeds and victories commemorated in the Old Testament were performed by men who practised abstinence. They never touched liquor. They prayed to Almighty God instead. Read all about it in the Holy Book. In contrast, think of Attila. This great king and conqueror, to his manifest shame and dishonour, died in his sleep from too much drink; he was bleeding at the nose, in fact. A military man should live soberly. Remember what was commanded of Lamuel. Was it Samuel? No. Lamuel. It is in the Book of Proverbs. ‘Give not to kings, Oh Lamuel, give not wine to kings. For there is no secret where drunkenness reigns.’ There is no need to say more on that subject. So let me turn to gambling.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  The construction of stable bodily contours relies upon fixed sites of corporeal permeability and impermeability. Those sexual practices in both homosexual and heterosexual contexts that open surfaces and orifices to erotic signification or close down others effectively reinscribe the boundaries of the body along new cultural lines. Anal sex among men is an example, as is the radical re-membering of the body in Wittig’s The Lesbian Body. Douglas alludes to “a kind of sex pollution which expresses a desire to keep the body (physical and social) intact,”60 suggesting that the naturalized notion of “the” body is itself a consequence of taboos that render that body discrete by virtue of its stable boundaries. Further, the rites of passage that govern various bodily orifices presuppose a heterosexual construction of gendered exchange, positions, and erotic possibilities. The deregulation of such exchanges accordingly disrupts the very boundaries that determine what it is to be a body at all. Indeed, the critical inquiry that traces the regulatory practices within which bodily contours are constructed constitutes precisely the genealogy of “the body” in its discreteness that might further radicalize Foucault’s theory.61 Significantly, Kristeva’s discussion of abjection in Powers of Horror begins to suggest the uses of this structuralist notion of a boundary-constituting taboo for the purposes of constructing a discrete subject through exclusion.62 The “abject” designates that which has been expelled from the body, discharged as excrement, literally rendered “Other.” This appears as an expulsion of alien elements, but the alien is effectively established through this expulsion. The construction of the “not-me” as the abject establishes the boundaries of the body which are also the first contours of the subject. Kristeva writes: nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. “I” want none of that element, sign of their desire; “I” do not want to listen, “I” do not assimilate it, “I” expel it. But since the food is not an “other” for “me,” who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself.63

• From City of Night (1963)

  A dreadful sound hurled inhumanly like a bolt out of his throat—a plunging bolt which buried itself instantly within my mind. His face turned to one side as if he would bite the floor in pain. Tears came from his eyes in a sudden deluge which joined the perspiration and turned his face into a gleaming mask of pain. And he sobbed: “Why... hurt?... Why... do you...? I... did... for you—... did everything!... Wanted—... want—... Why?... hurt... why?... Wanted lo—...” Clenched teeth choked the word he had been about to utter. The scene exploded in my mind. I was seized by the greatest revulsion of my whole life—a roiling, then a quick flooding invading my whole being like electricity; a maelstrom of revulsion—for myself, for him, loathing for him, for what he wanted done—loathing for what I was doing. And hearing the racked baleful sobs which continue (“Why... hurt?...” And again the unfinished word: “Wanted—want lo—...”)—seeing that writhing pitiful body, the boot pinioning him to the floor (like a worm! like a helpless worm! like a helpless worm tortured by children!)—seeing that face gleaming with tears and sweat—and feeling, myself, as if the world will now burst in a bright crashing light which will consume us both in judgment—I bent down over him, extending my hand to him—my foot removed from his scorched groin: extending my hand to him, to help him up—to help him!—as if he were the whole howling painracked ugly crushed mutilated, sad sad crying world, and I could now, at last, in that moment, by merely extending my hand to him in pity, help him—and It. Compassion flooded me as turbulently as, only seconds before, the seducing savagery had rocked me to my violated soul. And as the man sobbing on the floor in the disheveled wet costume saw my hand extended to him in pity, the howling stopped instantly as if a switch had been turned off within him, and his look changed to one of ferocious anger. And he shouted fiercely: “ No, no! Youre not supposed to care!” 4 “I knew youd come back,” he said victoriously. I had walked out on him that day, and I had stayed away for several days. “I understand,” he said. “In the first stages it can be difficult—for some. And those are the ones that turn out to be the best. This time you can use this whip.” He brandished a coiled leather snake. “And if youre ready, I’ll show you my ‘studio’ in the basement.” He had misunderstood my purpose in coming back—which was to show him (and to show myself?) that he could never seduce me in that way again. I knew it irrevocably when I saw a black costume lying across the leather-spread bed. He was bent over it folding it to replace it in the closet. It was the costume, complete with swastika, of a storm trooper. “Were you wearing that?” I asked him.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  In a few minutes he’d start laughing and tell us where his real parents lived, and we’d go there and a smiling woman with perfumed hair would welcome us and feed us steaming bowls of Cream of Wheat. I looked at Dad. He wasn’t smiling, and he kept pulling at the skin of his neck as if he were itchy. • • • We followed Erma and Stanley and Grandpa inside. It was cold in the house, and the air smelled of mold and cigarettes and unwashed laundry. We huddled around a potbellied cast-iron coal stove in the middle of the living room and held out our hands to warm them. Erma pulled a bottle of whiskey from the pocket of her housedress, and Dad looked happy for the first time since we’d left Phoenix. Erma ushered us into the kitchen, where she was fixing dinner. A bulb dangled from the ceiling, casting harsh light on the yellowed walls, which were coated with a thin film of grease. Erma stuck a curved steel handle into an iron disk on top of an old coal cooking stove, lifted it, and with her other hand grabbed a poker from the wall and jabbed at the hot orange coals inside. She stirred a potful of green beans stewing in fatback and poured in a big handful of salt. Then she set a tray of Pillsbury biscuits on the kitchen table and ladled out a plate of the beans for each of us kids. The beans were so overcooked that they fell apart when I stuck my fork in them and so salty that I could barely force myself to swallow. I pinched my nose closed, which was the way Mom had taught us to get down things that had gone a little bit rotten. Erma saw me and slapped my hand away. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” she said. There were three bedrooms upstairs, Erma said, but no one had been to the second floor in nigh on ten years, because the floorboards were rotted through. Uncle Stanley volunteered to give us his room in the basement and sleep on a cot in the foyer while we were there. “We’ll only be staying a few days,” Dad said, “until we find a place of our own.” After dinner, Mom and us kids went down into the basement. It was a big dank room, with cinder-block walls and a green linoleum floor. There was another coal stove, a bed, a pullout couch where Mom and Dad could sleep, and a chest of drawers painted fire-engine red. It held hundreds of dog-eared comic books—Little Lulu, Richie Rich, Beetle Bailey, Archie and Jughead—that Uncle Stanley had collected over the years. Under the chest of drawers were jugs of genuine moonshine. We kids climbed into Stanley’s bed. To make it less crowded, Lori and I lay down with our heads at one end, and Brian and Maureen lay down with theirs at the other.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  The boundary of the body as well as well as the distinction between internal and external is established through the ejection and transvaluation of something originally part of identity into a defiling otherness. As Iris Young has suggested in her use of Kristeva to understand sexism, homophobia, and racism, the repudiation of bodies for their sex, sexuality, and/or color is an “expulsion” followed by a “repulsion” that founds and consolidates culturally hegemonic identities along sex/race/sexuality axes of diferentiation.64 Young’s appropriation of Kristeva shows how the operation of repulsion can consolidate “identities” founded on the instituting of the “Other” or a set of Others through exclusion and domination. What constitutes through division the “inner” and “outer” worlds of the subject is a border and boundary tenuously maintained for the purposes of social regulation and control. The boundary between the inner and outer is confounded by those excremental passages in which the inner effectively becomes outer, and this excreting function becomes, as it were, the model by which other forms of identity-differentiation are accomplished. In effect, this is the mode by which Others become shit. For inner and outer worlds to remain utterly distinct, the entire surface of the body would have to achieve an impossible impermeability. This sealing of its surfaces would constitute the seamless boundary of the subject; but this enclosure would invariably be exploded by precisely that excremental filth that it fears. Regardless of the compelling metaphors of the spatial distinctions of inner and outer, they remain linguistic terms that facilitate and articulate a set of fantasies, feared and desired. “Inner” and “outer” make sense only with reference to a mediating boundary that strives for stability. And this stability, this coherence, is determined in large part by cultural orders that sanction the subject and compel its differentiation from the abject. Hence, “inner” and “outer” constitute a binary distinction that stabilizes and consolidates the coherent subject. When that subject is challenged, the meaning and necessity of the terms are subject to displacement. If the “inner world” no longer designates a topos, then the internal fixity of the self and, indeed, the internal locale of gender identity, become similarly suspect. The critical question is not how did that identity become internalized? as if internalization were a process or a mechanism that might be descriptively reconstructed. Rather, the question is: From what strategic position in public discourse and for what reasons has the trope of interiority and the disjunctive binary of inner/outer taken hold? In what language is “inner space” figured? What kind of figuration is it, and through what figure of the body is it signified? How does a body figure on its surface the very invisibility of its hidden depth?

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  Billy smushed his face against mine, then grabbed my hair and made my head bend sideways and stuck his tongue in my mouth. It was slimy and disgusting, but when I tried to pull away, he pushed in toward me. The more I pulled, the more he pushed, until he was on top of me and I felt his fingers tugging at my shorts. His other hand was unbuttoning his own pants. To stop him, I put my hand down there, and when I touched it, I knew what it was, even though I had never touched one before. … "Guess what?" Billy shouted. "I raped you!" I turned around and saw him standing there by the car, looking hurt and angry but not as tall as usual. I searched my mind for a cutting comeback, but since I didn't know what "rape" meant, all I could think to say was "Big deal!" At home I looked up the word in the dictionary. Then I looked up the words that explained it, and though I still couldn't figure it out completely, I knew it wasn't good.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  “Mom, Uncle Stanley is behaving inappropriately,” I said. “Oh, you’re probably imagining it,” she said. “He groped me! And he’s wanking off!” Mom cocked her head and looked concerned. “Poor Stanley,” she said. “He’s so lonely.” “But it was gross!” Mom asked me if I was okay. I shrugged and nodded. “Well, there you go,” she said. She said that sexual assault was a crime of perception. “If you don’t think you’re hurt, then you aren’t,” she said. “So many women make such a big deal out of these things. But you’re stronger than that.” She went back to her crossword puzzle. After that, I refused to go back to Grandpa’s. Being strong was fine, but the last thing I needed was Uncle Stanley thinking I was coming back for more of his fooling around. I did whatever it took to wash myself at Little Hobart Street. In the kitchen, we had an aluminum tub you could fit into if you pulled your legs up against your chest. By then the weather was warm enough to fill the tub with water from the tap under the house and bathe in the kitchen. After the bath, I crouched by the side of the tub and dipped my head in the water and washed my hair. But lugging all those buckets of water up to the house was hard work, and I would put off bathing until I was feeling pretty gamy. • • • In the spring, the rains came, drenching the valley for days in sheets of falling water. The water ran down the hillside gullies, pulling rocks and small trees with it, and spilled across the roads, tearing off chunks of asphalt. It gushed into the creeks, which swelled up and turned a foaming light brown, like a chocolate milk shake. The creeks emptied into the Tug, which overflowed its banks and flooded the houses and stores along McDowell Street. Mud was four feet deep in some houses, and folks’ pickups and mobile homes were swept away. Over in Buffalo Creek Hollow, a mine impoundment gave way, and a wave of black water thirty feet high killed 126 people. Mom said that this was how nature took her revenge on men who raped and pillaged the land, ruining nature’s own drainage system by clear-cutting forests and strip-mining mountains. Little Hobart Street was too high up in the hollow to get any flooding, but the rain washed parts of the road into the yards of the people who lived below us. The water also ate away some of the soil from around the pillars holding up our house, making it even more precarious. The hole in the kitchen ceiling widened, and then the ceiling on Brian and Maureen’s side of the bedroom started leaking. Brian had the top bunk, and when it rained, he’d spread a tarp over himself to keep the dripping water off. Everything in the house was damp.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  touched. It was exactly as they’d left it. Vix was disappointed but Caitlin said, “Thank God!” Abby had followed and was standing in the doorway. “I thought you’d like to do your room yourself,” she told Caitlin. “You know, choose your own colors and accessories.” Vix was thinking what a great time they’d have painting the drab wooden walls, organizing the collections, shopping in town. But Caitlin said, “I like it exactly the way it is, thank you!” and she slammed the bedroom door in Abby’s face. If Abby thought she was going to win points with Caitlin by making changes, she was mistaken. Vix wished there was a way for her to let Abby know that trying to please was not the way to win Caitlin’s affection. People who tried too hard disgusted her. A minute later Caitlin kicked off her shoes and smashed them against the wall. She beat her mildewed pillows against the books on her shelves until one of them opened, its feathers flying in all directions. She attacked her rock collection, sweeping it onto the floor. She hurled tennis racquets and swim fins across the room, then grabbed her desk chair and crashed it against the door of her closet. She cursed and cried as she destroyed everything in her path. Vix was in shock. She’d never seen anyone behave that way. Once, in fourth grade, she’d come home from school crying hysterically because a boy in class had called her a whore. She’d had no idea what the word meant. Neither did he but she didn’t know that at the time. Whore, whore, whore ... the other boys in the class chanted, taunting her for a week. Tawny had shown no sympathy. “Save your tears for something important, Victoria. There’s no need to display your emotions in public. Do you want those boys to have power over you?” “No.” “Then remember what I’m telling you. Keep your feelings to yourself. Don’t ever show anyone your disappointment.” That was the last time she’d let Tawny see her tears. As she crouched between the twin beds, protecting her head with her hands, she thought about Tawny’s advice and felt proud for knowing how to keep her feelings to herself. Obviously no one had taught Caitlin to save her tears for something important.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  After Dad had gone back upstairs to tie into Erma's hooch and we kids were all in bed, Brian bit my toe to try to make me laugh, but I kicked him away. We all lay there in the silent darkness. "Dad was really weird," I said, because someone had to say it. "You'd be weird, too, if Erma was your mom," Lori said. "Do you think she ever did something to Dad like what she did to Brian?" I asked. No one said a thing. It was gross and creepy to think about, but it would explain a lot. Why Dad left home as soon as he could. Why he drank so much and why he got so angry. Why he never wanted to visit Welch when we were younger. Why … he was shaking his head so hard, almost like he wanted to put his hands over his ears, when I tried to explain what Erma had been doing to Brian. "Don't think about things like that," Lori told me. "It'll make you crazy." And so I put it out of my mind.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  But this did not enlighten me much. There is one other thing I forgot to mention. He was always the last rider in our little group. There was a SUMMONER with us, unfortunately. He had the face of a fiery cherub, covered with pimples. He had swollen eyelids, adding to the unfortunate impression. He was as hot and lecherous as the proverbial London sparrow. His eyebrows were scabby, and the hair was falling out of his beard. You could understand why children were afraid of him. There was no medicine or ointment, no quicksilver or brimstone, no sulphur or cream of tartar, no white lead or borax, that could remove those unsightly pustules. They were like oyster shells on his cheeks. His diet may have had something to do with it. He loved onions, garlic and leeks, which are well known to nourish bitter humours; he drank the strongest red wine he could find and, in his cups, he would talk and cry out as if he were mad. ‘You are all janglers and clatterers!’ he said. He was looking at me at the time. When he was completely drunk he would speak only in Latin, and one evening he sang out the old rhyme: Nos vagabunduli Laeti, jucunduli, Tara, tarantare, teino. He knew two or three Latin terms that he had learned from some ecclesiastical law-book. ‘I will give you,’ he said, ‘dispositio, expositio and conclusio.’ This was the kind of language he used when he summoned the citizens to the Church courts and the local assize. He had learned it all by rote. But we all know that a parrot can say ‘good-day’ as well as any pope. If anyone ever tried to question him further, then his well of learning suddenly dried up. He would cry out, ‘Questio quid juris?’, which is to say, ‘What point of law are you trying to make?’ And that was that. He was a bit of a buffoon, in other words, but some swore that he was kind-hearted. For the payment of a quart of wine, for example, he would allow some rascal to keep his mistress for a year; then he would excuse him completely. In secret he could pull a few swindles - and pull other things, too, if you know what I mean. If he came across any other scoundrel in flagrante he would counsel him to ignore any archdeacon’s curse or threat of excommunication. If a man’s soul was in his purse, only then would it be painful; only the purse was really punished. ‘The purse,’ he used to say, ‘is the archdeacon’s hell.’ In that, of course, he was wholly wrong. Every guilty man should fear the consequences of excommunication, just as absolution is the only salvation for the human soul. The wicked man should beware, too, of the writ that consigns the excommunicated to the prison cell.