Affective Governmentality
| Author | Michael Ashworth |
| Published date | 01 April 2017 |
| Date | 01 April 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663916666630 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Social & Legal Studies
2017, Vol. 26(2) 188–207
Affective Governmentality:
ª The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permission:
Governing Through
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663916666630
Disgust in Uganda
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Michael Ashworth
University of Bristol, UK
Abstract
This article questions the extent to which calculable numbers are indispensable to the
government of conduct. By focusing on the role played by disgust in the government of
sexual minorities in Uganda, it provides an account of government by emotion, or
affective governmentality. This article draws on the literature on disgust, appropriating
elements from the various disciplines and perspectives and bringing them under a
Foucauldian umbrella. It explores two techniques through which attempts were made to
arouse disgust: the sermon and the tabloid expose´. Although such techniques were
performed by agents who operated beyond the state, this article contends that the
emergence of the Anti-Homosexuality Act 2014 cannot be accounted for without
considering the role played by disgust.
Keywords
Affect, Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009, Anti-Homosexuality Act 2014, disgust, Foucault,
LGBT, sexual minorities, techniques of government, Uganda
Introduction
This article is about disgust and the role it plays in the government of sexual minorities in
Uganda. It considers the extent to which it is possible to account for government by
emotion. However, such an enquiry appears to fly in the face of received wisdom in
governmentality studies. Seemingly taking inspiration from his view that statistics are
the primary ‘technical factor’ of modern governmentality (Foucault, 2009: 107), Fou-
cault’s interlocutors have come to regard numbers as indispensable to the ‘conduct of
Corresponding author:
Michael Ashworth, School of Law, University of Bristol, Office 5.69, Wills Memorial Building, Queens Road,
Bristol, BS8 1RJ, UK.
Email: michael.ashworth@bristol.ac.uk
Ashworth
189
conduct’ (Gordon, 1991: 2). For many, ‘[t]o govern a problem requires that it be
counted’ (Rose, 1999: 221). Ghertner (2010) breaks with this orthodoxy by suggesting
that aesthetic normativity can be an equally potent basis for governmental practice
(Ghertner, 2010). Indeed, in his study of slum clearance in Delhi, he charts a marked
shift away from rational, scientific survey practices towards what he calls ‘aesthetic
governmentality’, where slums that violate aesthetic norms are deemed illegal. He asks:
‘What is to say that other forms of knowledge do not have greater power in producing
governmental effects?’ (Ghertner, 2010: 209). That is the starting point of this article.
Although the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Act 2014 (AHA) sparked off ‘an inter-
national firestorm’ (Mutua, 2011: 457) for its draconian provisions which, in bill form,
included the death penalty for ‘aggravated homosexuality’, this article argues that its
emergence cannot be accounted for without considering the role played by disgust.
Furthermore, it argues that disgust is the result of a tireless labour on the part of agents
that operate ‘beyond the state’, including parents, teachers, social workers, medical,
media and religious authorities (Miller and Rose, 2008). In so doing, this article draws
on the vast body of literature on disgust and suggests it is a capacity activated during
childhood and instrumentalized by authorities thereafter. Although it can serve an innoc-
uous or beneficial purpose when directed towards certain ends, such as cleanliness in the
kitchen, this article suggests that when directed towards groups of individuals disgust
becomes a means of ‘erecting . . . particular regimes of violence and domination’
(Mbembe, 1992: 5). In other words, disgust becomes a ‘mechanism of stigmatization’
(Nussbaum, 2010: 22). This article explores how affective governmentality operates
through disgust towards Uganda’s sexual minorities.
The article is structured as follows: first, it provides a brief review of the literature on
disgust, considering its root, objects, benefits and universality; second, it draws on
aspects of the literature and reconsiders disgust from a Foucauldian perspective; third,
it provides a short overview of the development of the AHA; fourth, it explores the
techniques through which attempts are made to incite disgust, focusing in particular on
the public sermon and the tabloid expose´; and, finally, this article concludes by sum-
marizing the findings and reflecting on affective governmentality as an analytical
framework.
The contribution of this article lies in its broadening of the idea of how government is
exercised, its creative appropriation and incorporation of existing disgust literature into a
Foucauldian framework and its filling of a gap concerning the ‘how’ of disgust. As such,
this article represents a contribution to governmentality studies, sexualities studies, and
scholarship on disgust.
Theorizing Disgust
In recent years there has been a boom in disgust scholarship. Once the affective beˆte
noire of academia, its meteoric rise in the last 20 years has led to claims that it is ‘the
unlikely academic star of our time’ (Strohminger, 2014: 478). It has been explored from
a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including anthropology, law, philosophy, psycho-
analysis, psychology and neuroscience. These approaches have, to varying degrees,
sought to explain what lies at the root of disgust, what kinds of objects people find
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disgusting, whether or not disgust serves a useful purpose, whether disgust is a universal
condition and whether there are any universally reviled objects of disgust.
While much of the literature is adept as describing the ‘what’ and speculating as to the
‘why’ of disgust, there seems to be gaps in the how. This is a gap this article hopes to address.
The Root of Disgust
Some of the earliest work on disgust came from Darwin, who, while noting it means
‘something offensive to taste’, considered it to be an aversive, food-related emotion with
recognizable physiological manifestations – nausea – and recognizable facial expres-
sions (Darwin, 1872: 257). Angyal similarly considered it to be food related, although he
suggested its aversive characteristic stems from the fact that contact with disgust objects
is seen as debasing (Angyal, 1941). He noted that oral incorporation of such objects is
regarded as particularly disgusting. Rozin and Fallon, in what would mark the beginning
of an extensive body of modern psychological research on the issue, build on Darwin’s
and Angyal’s insights, suggesting that what ultimately disgusts is that which reminds
people of their animal origins (Rozin and Fallon, 1987). Agreeing with Angyal, they
consider the mouth to be a particularly formidable zone of disgust.
Freud, perhaps unsurprisingly, considered disgust to be rooted in sexual desire. Dis-
gust, along with shame, is a reaction formation; a mental barrier constructed to suppress
the consummation of childhood sexual impulses (Freud, 1949). Becker provided an
alternative psychoanalytic explanation for disgust: it is, at root, tied to anxiety around
our mortality (Becker, 1973). For Kristeva, who deals with it via her psychoanalytic
theory of abjection, disgust concerns rejection of the maternal (Kristeva, 1982). Miller,
in his social history of disgust, posits that ‘ultimately the basis for all disgust is us’ – our
lives from birth to death, as we emit ‘substances and odors that make us doubt ourselves
and fear our neighbours’ (Miller, 1997: xiv).
Perhaps the most notable contribution came from Douglas, who provided a starkly
anti-essentialist account of dirt. She cast doubt on the idea that Western aversions to the
disgusting are primarily pathogen related (and therefore rational), in contradistinction to
the aversions of non-Western cultures which are largely symbolic or magical (and
therefore irrational). As Anderson (1995) demonstrates, American colonial health offi-
cers in early 20th century Philippines imagined everything they encountered to be
‘brownwashed’ with a thin film of germs’ requiring ‘massive, ceaseless disinfection’
(Anderson, 1995: 641).
For Douglas, once knowledge of pathogenicity is scrubbed from understandings of
dirt, what is left is ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas, 2001: 36). What is construed as dirty or
polluting is that which transgresses systems of classification. Thus, she argued, food is
not inherently dirty, but food splattered over clothing is considered disgusting. In other
words, ‘where there is dirt, there is system’ (Douglas, 2001: 36).
The Objects of Disgust
There is an immense corpus of literature, particularly in experimental psychology, which
seeks to explore and differentiate in increasingly minute detail what people find
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disgusting. Consequently, taxonomies have been produced in North American psycho-
logical laboratories, in the hopes of adequately capturing the complexity of the disgust-
ing, including the heterogeneity of disgust elicitors as well as the variance between
individuals in their disgust sensitivity (Haidt et al., 1994, 1997).
Disgust is said to be aroused through the senses: taste, touch, smell and vision, with
the possible exception of hearing (Miller, 1997: 82–85). What, then, are some of the
objects commonly regarded in the literature as having disgusting sensory properties?
Bodily products such as faeces, urine, vomit, nasal discharges, pus, semen and blood
are cited as common sources of disgust. Whereas tears...
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