Gut Cultures: Metabolic Personhood and the Promise of Wellness

When did you first learn to be uneasy in your appetite? My current manuscript engages U.S. imperialism as a sensorial project through the poetics of food, health, and eating. The manuscript interrogates how wellness and diet culture become major ideological exports of U.S. empire that produce global consumer whose nutritional and medical decisions become racially coded and gendered during the American century. By examining minor histories of wellness foods and technologies—such as the calorie and fat-free milk—Gut Cultures brings the specificities of transpacific study to the fantasy of health as an individual pursuit while marking the limits of neoliberalism as an analytic framework for our contemporary epoch. Moreover, Asian American and diasporic cultural production around food, eating, and body surveillance gestures to ways un-disciplined bodies of color have navigated, resisted, and disrupted forms of capture and classification.