Anus Epistemology: From Abjection to Composting Knowledge

Abstract

This article develops anus epistemology from the claim that the anus is not naturally abject. It becomes abject through practices that separate inside from outside, proper matter from waste, and the self-contained subject from the relations that sustain it. Beginning with this production of bodily order, the article examines how the anus is privatised and closed in support of property, masculinity, reproductive normativity, and the fantasy of sovereign selfhood. It then asks how anality can interrupt these arrangements without being romanticised as inherently emancipatory. Disidentification and refusal provide a way to work through imposed meanings while resisting both shame and commodified transgression. The analysis locates these differences within class relations rather than treating identity as a self-sufficient political endpoint. The argument subsequently shifts from symbolic abjection to material porosity. Excretion places bodies within ecological and infrastructural circuits in which matter becomes nourishment, pollution, labour, or risk according to how it is organised. This multispecies account also refuses to reduce farmed animals to carriers of nutrients and waste. From this relation, composting becomes an epistemological proposition: knowledge should be understood not as detached accumulation, but as situated transformation, circulation, and accountable return. Anus epistemology thus names a limited method for thinking embodiment and knowledge without presuming mastery, purity, or closure.