Disgust has many triggers, some obvious, others less so. What disgusts us is never irrevocably fixed and certain. It changes from culture to culture and even, at times, within a culture. This fluidity makes the term disgust at once deadly simple and extremely complex.
In The Hydra's Tale, University of Alberta Professor Emeritus Robert Rawdon Wilson treats the experience of disgust: not from the perspective of the disgusting object-in-the-world, but from its representation.
Disgust marks either a slip over the border of the socially sanctioned or a struggle to keep someone or something from crossing that border. Working through the spectrum of human response, culture, and art, Wilson teases out the assumptions that underpin the disgust response.