ABSTRACT
Julia Kristeva’s reading of the abject opens the door for considering “filth” as an imaginative element of social systems. The excremental literary mode – what Susan Signe Morrison terms “fecopoetics” – frequently addresses questions of social order, and the extent to which hierarchies can or cannot be upset. In the seventeenth century, Ben Jonson invested in a fecopoetics of retaliation; comedies like The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair humorously associate the privileged with excrement. Highlighting the anxieties and tensions of a prescriptive social order, Jonson’s fecopoetics variously reinforces hierarchies and calls them into question.
This chapter considers Jonson’s work in conversation with the comedic fecopoetics of gendered American pop culture. Male-centric comedies like American Pie , Van Wilder, and Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle display similarly retaliatory strategies, punishing privileged characters with laxatives and public scenes of excretion that embarrass them, in Bakhtin’s terms, with a grotesque bodily openness that marks them as “lower.” Like Jonson’s comedies, such scenes mobilize a fecopoetics of wish fulfillment, suggesting that social boundaries can and should be breached, and using excrement as a social equalizer. In the comedy Bridesmaids , however, a similar joke scripted for a group of women functions differently, as everyone but the wealthiest woman falls victim to food poisoning. The scene validates the main character’s anxieties about her financial and physical inadequacies; only the privileged female body remains intact, reinforcing social hierarchies. Undermining the film’s ending, which glosses over socioeconomic distinctions, Bridesmaids’s comedic fecopoetics remind audiences that class is not gender-neutral, and highlight the importance of food – and its complications – in mapping the intersections of class and gender in the cultural languages surrounding bodies.
