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Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly

Catherine Keyser
Référence(s) :

Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly. Sexual Cultures Series. New York, NYU Press, 2024, 288 p., ISBN: 9781479819225. $30 USD / £25.99 GBP.

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1Kyla Wazana Tompkins’ first book, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (2012), has played a pivotal role in shifting the center of gravity in food studies from the comestible to what Tompkins calls “the erotic and political life of the mouth” (Racial Indigestion 55). In its attention to “orifices and openings” and “queer alimentarity” (55, 69), Racial Indigestion teased out the sensuous and queer possibilities harbored within—and indeed expressed in spite of—the violent structures of white supremacy. In Deviant Matter, Tompkins continues to pursue queer and Black figures for enlivening excess that speak to the work of survival. Where Racial Indigestion features the central metaphor of the body politic, in this book, Tompkins attends to microbial, textural, and affective categories that traverse bodies—not merely (though importantly) through ingestion and touch but also through the materiality of flesh and gut as well as the brew of transcorporeal substances that we all steep in.

2Deviant Matter starts from the premise that “state hygiene projects” try to regulate microbial duplication in part because of the unsettling resemblance to mass social movements (133). This attempt to control or eradicate “deviant matter” reflects a colonial ideology that in turn supports racism on the state level (7). Tompkins adopts queer of color critique to champion fermentation, intoxication, and rot against pasteurization, sobriety, and taste. She demonstrates that unruly affects and materials are associated with marginalized populations (Black and brown, poor white, queer) and can be reclaimed through precisely what she calls their “deviant” energies. Where Racial Indigestion featured the imagined bodies of citizens and the nation, Deviant Matter turns to affective collectivities—one might even say colloids, as Tompkins is particularly interested in viscosity and liminality.

3Following the cultural life of matter, its energetic capacities (both literal and metaphorical), and its policing by the state, Tompkins’ argument moves swiftly, even vertiginously between scales of analysis. At times while reading Deviant Matter, I felt like Alice drinking and eating in Wonderland, now tiny and in the next moment telescoping to the vast. In her introduction, Tompkins propounds the interpretive rewards of “juxtaposing objects […] as a way to think in ever more lively ways toward ever more lively and larger horizons” (29). She roots this praxis in both feminist science studies (Karen Barad) and Black studies (Audre Lorde, Sylvia Wynter, Fred Moten). What Tompkins dubs her “promiscuous method” exceeds the boundaries of periodization and employs an associative style designed to inspire further speculation. Though the one-word chapter titles are broad, their contents are best understood as riffs on the keyword rather than a categorical account. As Tompkins observes: “At times, these texts seem to come together randomly” (28). There are moments in Deviant Matter when these juxtapositions feel more sublime and suggestive than others. Nonetheless, Tompkins makes an invigorating case for interdisciplinary methods and unlikely archives, refusing colonial taxonomies in order to reveal “the deep imbrication of Black, brown, and queer life with the history of matter” (25).

4Chapter One on “Hygiene” is a difficult chapter because it essentially describes the aesthetics and politics that the rest of the book is arrayed against. In this chapter, Tompkins connects two strains of scholarship—one on normative state aesthetics and the other on settler-colonialism’s operation through standardization and extraction. Tompkins also correlates the push for “non-adulteration” from the proponents of the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) with a style that she calls “‘realism,’ in its most limited definition” (50). In Tompkins’ view, the boring aesthetics of bureaucratic genres like USDA reports are not a bug but a feature—scientism and reasonableness projected by the form itself. When Tompkins describes the USDA documents most fully, they sound interesting (perhaps in spite of themselves). These publications that aspire to generalization and standardization in fact betray their own heterogeneity:

Early annual reports from the department […] do not include tables of contents and display no obvious organizing principle: articles describing the agricultural possibilities of various states are followed by essays on apples, horses, hogs, and machinery and some reports back from scientists such as entomologists. (41)

Here I briefly glimpse the collaboration of a multitude of civil servants in their scattershot attempts to express the particularities of their regional agricultural life. Certainly, Tompkins is correct in describing this bureaucracy in terms of settler colonialism and ideologies of extraction. But this print cultural archive is largely used as a straw man against which to pit deviant matter.

5Chapter Two on “Ferment,” by contrast, is much more compelling. Tompkins argues that the multiplicative energy of fermentation provided a common figure for crowd dynamics and labor energy. In an excellent use of methods drawn from periodical studies, Tompkins contrasts the use of the word “ferment” by a sensationalist newspaper, which vilifies the verb, and an abolitionist one, which uses it to evince activism and collectivity. In the final section of the chapter, Tompkins turns to the description of yeasty aliveness as a form of white belonging and virtuous productivity in Louisa May Alcott’s Candy Country: “[Alcott] describes a structure of feeling linked to biopolitical belonging that is understood as joyful, creative, and—most importantly—effortlessly energetic and productive. In this fermentative regime, labor is never labored” (78). This children’s story turns the effervescent energy of fermentation toward whiteness rising.

6In Chapter Three, Tompkins tackles “Intoxication,” extending her critique of the Pure Food and Drug Act and asking the rather broad rhetorical question “What is not intoxication, and what is not an intoxicant?” (87). In the first half of the chapter, Tompkins examines a set of brochures advertising a patent medicine, which featured minstrel stories alongside patient testimonials from white people. In these brochures, Tompkins argues, white intoxication through patent medicines is rewarded, while associated improprieties (like drunkenness and sexual promiscuity) are assigned to Blackness. The brochure, then, exposes “the relation between white disinhibition and Black terror” (103). In the second half of the chapter, Tompkins takes up Winsor McCay’s comic strip Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, which represents the wild dreams resulting from the pre-bedtime consumption of Welsh rarebit (beer and melted cheese). The author of the strips depicts his dreamers multiplying, whether by way of tumors, mushrooms, or multiple heads, and Tompkins identifies in this imagery a representation of fermentation and cellular activity drawn from the early cinema. These dreamscape images challenge a singular view of self as well as the rule of rationality.

7Chapter Four on “Rot” offers a meditation on queer sexuality’s identification with garbage, rot, and the flow of uncontrollable and abject matter, further associated with Blackness and racial difference. Tompkins begins with a powerful reading of Giovanni’s Room, which represents garbage but not gay sex: “the decaying presence of garbage and rot” betokens “Giovanni’s refusal to concede the space and scale of the everyday to the hygienic imperatives, such as state-sanctioned heteronormativity, that sanitize pleasure and kill what makes life worth living” (145). Tompkins also describes the sensory onslaught of conceptual art, Candace Lin riffing on Giovanni’s Room in her A Hard White Body installation and Adrian Piper photographing rotting meat and then its consumption by her white lover. In this trio of examples, Tompkins offers brilliant reflections on waste and eroticism, whiteness, materiality, and the sensorium. Tompkins ends the chapter with a lyrical invocation of rot as a refusal of the deadening logics of human exceptionalism: “Let us be the rot that decomposes disciplinarity; let us be the critics sitting in the decay of history. Let us be the rot that survives” (172).

8In another section of the chapter, Tompkins examines a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States, giving the state of Louisiana the right to legislate about the sanitation and hygiene of slaughterhouses, which were dumping waste into the river. Tompkins points out that the plaintiff who lost was a white supremacist who did not want to see slaughterhouses forcibly integrated, but she also laments that the decision ultimately contributed to the fall of Reconstruction by providing a precedent for the elevation of states’ rights over federal intervention, which would later block civil rights protections. Tompkins’ legal interpretation becomes somewhat confusing, as she bemoans both sides—the plaintiff for his white supremacist aims and the judge for the racist repercussions of his attempts to protect urban sanitation. The extension of state power in this decision, Tompkins opines, “laid the groundwork for the particular technology through which state racism later occurred” (150). She suggests also that this decision’s “hygienic imperatives” might be “better define[d] […] [through] folk theories of racial infection instead of scientifically investigated germ theory” (150), but she defends this claim not through recourse to the language of the decision but rather in light of its outcome.

9Deviant Matter tackles regulation as a juridical means to enforce biopolitical normativity and to police vulnerable populations. Nonetheless, I find it difficult to reject regulation as a concept or to identify it with state violence as consistently as Tompkins seems to do. Tompkins must have written the manuscript before the Supreme Court of the United States gutted the state’s regulatory power by striking down the Chevron doctrine in June 2024. Nonetheless, reading with the Chevron decision and Project 2025 in mind, it was difficult for me to absorb these Foucauldian critiques of regulation without feeling much more urgently the imminent consequences of the authoritarian push in the United States and elsewhere to deregulate industry and to hobble the government’s ability to serve the public efficiently and effectively. Those civil servants who compiled the USDA reports that Tompkins limns as evidence of the slippery slope towards “a carceral state” (51) were, at the very least, trying to participate in a collective project of governance—as limited as their vision of that collectivity or its aims may have been. While I take Tompkins’ reservations about purity politics and racism, and I recognize that her declared project in this book is to read “against the state” (19), one potential pitfall of the interdisciplinary method that she models and advances in this book is the leveling of terrain. Urine-soaked ceramics in a conceptual art exhibit bear fewer consequences (aside from the assaulted senses of the voluntary visitor) than does an offal-clogged river for the inhabitants of the city that draws its water supply from it.

10The final chapter on “Jelly” is perhaps the most powerful of the book and will shape my thinking—like a Jell-O mold—on viscosity, the textural, and the erotic for a long time to come. Tompkins begins the chapter with a scene from the film Snowpiercer, which provides a dystopian view of gelatin as the distillation of caloric value (in this case from the crushed bodies of cockroaches). Tompkins then explores the physics of “rheology,” “classes of liquids that behave as though they were solids and solids that behave as though they were liquids” (177). These substances share a defining capacity to “bounce back” (180). In the rest of the chapter, Tompkins pursues the productive tension between the gelatinous as abject and the rheological as energetic, haptic, and collective. Both Herman Melville and Martin Delany use glutinous and disgusting puddings to “render suffering acutely present at a sensory level” (199), representing the food of the poor (Melville) and the enslaved (Delany). But the gelatinous is not only consumed by bodies; it constitutes those bodies, and in “the gelatinous movement of fat,” Tompkins sees “a way to survive being deformed without breaking, to use the deformations of the world to make our own energy” (200). To this end, Tompkins reads a pornographic screensaver, “Generous Gesture: Butt-Massage Video Wallpaper,” which creates “queer community” through “an exchange of sexual or erotic care” and features the gelatinousness of buttocks (201). This chapter exemplifies why I find Tompkins’ work so exciting—its rhythms and energies generative, communicable, transformative.

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Bibliographie

TOMPKINS, Kyla Wazana. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century. New York: New York University Press, 2012.

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Catherine Keyser, « Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly »Transatlantica [En ligne], 2 | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2024, consulté le 09 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/23601 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/134hj

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Catherine Keyser

University of South Carolina

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