SOCIAL SCIENCES

Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot

by Kyla Wazana Tompkins
NYU. Dec. 2024. 288p. ISBN 9781479819225. pap. $30. SOC SCI
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Drawing from a wide range of insights from multiple sources and areas of scholarship, this book examines the four materialities of ferment, intoxicants, jelly, and rot. Award-winning Tompkins (gender and sexuality studies, Univ. at Buffalo; English, Pomona Coll.; Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century) argues that understanding them leads to better comprehension of how various groups are policed and discourses of science. Her book explains the link between the four materialities and forms of life, and it examines how aesthetics and politics intersect and form the contemporary state of affairs. Ultimately, this book is about how people in subaltern communities are resistant to attempts of definition, categorization, and control, a theme reflected in both her arguments and her methodologies to reach her sound conclusions.
VERDICT Fascinating and thought-provoking, Tompkins’s book will benefit academic or research libraries, along with readers who enjoy works about cultural or food studies.
Reviewed by Nick D'Andrea , Dec 20, 2024
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