Why one should not read this blog II

Waste, dirt, disgust etc. etc. are no new topics to the humanities, even though people regularly like to claim so (e.g. Cohen 2005). Yesterday I started reading William Ian Millers "The Anatomy of Disgust" (1997), which quotes Susan Miller, who has published an article on disgust in the International Review of Psychoanalysis as early as 1986. Interestingly Susan says exactly what I said in my first entry (and William Miller agrees): She complains that "contact with the disgusting makes one disgusting. To study disgust is to risk contamination; jokes about his or her unwholesome interests soon greet the disgust researcher." Well, I wouldn't say it that harshly-- and I think she does exaggerate--but it strongly reminds me of the big laughs I got when people told each other I was writing a PhD on rubbish. I guess it is something people cannot take seriously without risking contamination.
The sad thing about it though is that according to XF of the STRC PhD researchers should do research on successful things, whereby they become experts on success - in this sense I'll be an expert on disgusting stuff, which surely provides great employability. No, of course I don't share that collaborative perspective anyway.