You Must Be Shitting Me

Abstract

This article explores the gendered construction of disgust, and analyzes how it plays out in Peter Vack’s 2017 directorial-debut Assholes. Based on feminist and queer scholarship on abjection, disgust, and the social construction of bodies and sexualities, this article aims to delve into how Assholes frames the relationship between disgust and masculinity, as it shifts how gendered bodily boundaries are played onscreen. The movie’s un-shaming of women’s bodily functions and fluids directly impacts its representation of disgust and masculinity; it destabilizes the discourses that have framed normative—white, heterosexual, and able-bodied—masculinity as non-disgusting; and it establishes that normative male bodies can, too, become abject.