Disgust, Disgust : A disgusting study about scent, bodyfluids, writing vomit and eating oneself and others in Aliide, Aliide, Parfymen, Nekrofilen, Våtmarker and Tid för kärlek

This essay explores and examines disgust in five literary figures and books based on scent, bodyfluids and abjection. Together with Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection and Sara Ahmed's "The Performativity of Disgust" in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, I analyze these books, and my position as a researchsubject. The questions I ask are: What does disgust mean? How do the subject's boundaries shift when things penetrate the body? How are scents, body fluids and disgust expressed in relation to power and the female body? And what does it mean that I stick my reading experiences on the texts I read? The analysis begins in Mare Kandre's novel Aliide, Aliide and how gaze, power and girlhood are made, as well as how abjection takes place in the intake of milk and larvae. Body in body and body against body are analyzed based on Aliide's disgust in the novel. I discuss how something growing inside is experienced as disgusting and frightening and connect it to the pregnant body and the fetus as abjection. In the second chapter of the analyze, it is Parfymen: berättelsen om en mördare by Patrick Süskind that focuses on the scent of the female body that Grenouille, the main character tries to extract and master. The gaze on the female body and the extraction of fragrance is in focus here and in Nekrofilen by Gabrielle Wittkop, Lucien's desire for the dead body is examined. The body fluids, such as the vomit that the bodies excrete can be read as limits to life and death. In the third and final analysis section, I read these books with affect. I reconnect to my introduction where Ulf Lundell's poems made me feel disgusted. I use Ahmed's concept of performativity to discuss how cannibalism - reading - eating body fluids are connected, and how writing about disgust, is a form om vomiting. I examine my own writing subject and what an affective reading does to literary studies and the research position. In conclusion, I discuss how the universal and the subjective making of disgust effect research.