Description
Book SynopsisDirt - and our rituals to eradicate it - is as much a part of our everyday lives as eating, breathing and sleeping. Yet this very fact means that we seldom stop to question what we mean by dirt. What do our attitudes to dirt and cleanliness tell us about ourselves and the societies we live in? Exploring a wide variety of settings - domestic, urban, suburban and rural - the contributors expose how our ideas about dirt are intimately bound up with issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and the body. The result is a a rich and challenging work that extends our understanding of historical and contemporary cultural manifestations of dirt and cleanliness.
Table of ContentsContents Introduction: materialities and metaphors of dirt and cleanliness Ben Campkin and Rosie Cox Section 1 Home: Domestic Dirt and Cleaning 1 Linguistic leakiness or really dirty? Dirt in social theory Carol Wolkowitz 2 Domestic workers and pollution in Brazil Livia Barbosa 3 The visible and the invisible Lydia Martens 4 Bring home the dead: purity & filth in contemporary funeral homes Kyro Selket Section 2 City & Suburb: Urban Dirt and Cleansing 5 Degradation and regeneration: theories of dirt and the contemporary city Ben Campkin 6 From the dirty city to the spoiled suburb Paul Watt 7 Dangers lurking everywhere: the sex offender as pollution Pamela K. Gilbert 8 Hygiene aesthetics on London’s gay scene: the stigma of AIDS Johan Andersson 9 Spiritual cleansing: priests & prostitutes in early Victorian London Dominic Janes 10 Mapping sewer spaces in mid-Victorian London Paul Dobraszczyk 11 The cinematic sewer David L. Pike Section 3 Country: Constructing Rural Dirt Introduction Rosie Cox 12 Dirt & development: alternative , modernities in Thailand Alyson Brody 13 Dirty Foods, Healthy Communities ? Gareth Enticott 14 Dirty vegetables connecting consumers to the growing of their food Lewis Holloway, Laura Venn, Rosie Cox, Moya Kneafsey, Elizabeth Dowler, Herlena Tuomainen 15 Dirty cows: perceptions of BSE/vCJD Bruce A. Scholten Contributors Notes References Index
