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Paper short abstract

I think from the gut, considering the convergence of bottoming, the microbiome, and clinical experience. As a gay man who bottoms and has ulcerative colitis, I combine queer theory, feminist science studies, and embodied crip gut knowledge, to generate resources for imagining futures otherwise.

Paper long abstract

In this paper I theorise the gut as a naturalcultural site where sexual practices, multispecies ecologies, and chronic illness converge. I write from a position of embodied knowledge; I am a gay man who bottoms, who also has ulcerative colitis. The paper performs the cripistemological claim it advances: that non-normative gut knowledge is legitimate and necessary. I open with openings. Thinking with queer scholars of bottoming and receptive anal eroticism, I establish the non-sovereign, porous subject as both philosophical and biological. The (bottom of the) gut is where the ethics of opening and hospitality meets the politics of inflammation. UC is an autoimmune condition in which the body attacks its own mucosal lining, failing to distinguish self from non-self. This turns the openness that queer thinking celebrates into a site of damage. The rectum is both the site of queer theory’s shattering, and the body’s autoimmune self-attack. Reading microbiome science through feminist new materialist frameworks, I argue that the gut is a multispecies assemblage, always already opened up to microbial strangers. Furthermore, drugs are taken into the body to sustain sexual practices of bodily opening. In the clinic, however, I have faced normalising assumptions from medical professionals where PrEP becomes a flag for pathology. Finally, I propose that the temporalities of gut troubles – flare, remission, urgency, uncertainty – offer resources for imagining gut futures oriented toward accommodation and multispecies flourishing rather than the restoration of normative function.