Tompkins writes of a “sense of atmosphere as being violently everywhere, of an aesthetic and affective violence that adheres to you as the world you move through or (not so) simply as a condition of the everyday.”

Our world is changing in unclassifiable ways, and we with it. Sometimes we’re pushing through it, as if it were gelatin. We have “a wish to look directly at what is facing us,” the oncoming blob, the mess we travel with and against. The trash heap, the going-to-dieness, the matter overtaking us, the time limit, the disaster gazing inside itself for solution. The question of how we phrase our plea to power when power is demanding that we phrase it apolitically. How we appear, quivering.

"...gelatin renders waves of energy visible to the eye in real time, allowing scientists to measure, and the rest of us to witness, otherwise invisible energy through its effects as responsive, relational, material change. Gelatin makes visible what is generally invisible to the eye, like sound waves or other seismic and vibrational activity."

I imagine that, when we "push through a heavy space and time" like this political moment we're in, the jelly is around us, but we too are jelly. We make of that what we will.

This book is not for everyone. Did I personally enjoy it? Mostly yes. The topic of yeast, ferments, mold, rot and many other titular deviant matters are not something I have ever thought about researching. But for people who are curious, who like searching up non-fiction on "weird" themes, this would be a perfect pick. The book itself is written in a very entertaining way, not hard to understand, I breezed through it in a couple of days but as I mentioned, it will never be everyone's cup of tea. Although I have personally come to enjoy its taste.

Kyla Wazana Tompkins’ work, Deviant Matter, presents a groundbreaking exploration of the intersections between materiality, race, sexuality, and consumption. As a scholar deeply engaged in critical race theory, queer theory, and cultural studies, Tompkins interrogates the ways in which material objects and bodies are imbued with social meanings and power dynamics. In Deviant Matter, she extends her previous work—such as her acclaimed book Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century—to consider how materiality itself becomes "deviant" in cultural imaginaries.

The concept of "deviant matter" plays on dual meanings: both as physical substances deemed abnormal, improper, or transgressive and as a metaphor for bodies and identities that defy normative expectations. Tompkins draws from an eclectic range of sources, including historical texts, art, food practices, and literary works, to analyze how societies discipline and regulate matter that threatens hegemonic order. Her approach destabilizes traditional boundaries between human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate, challenging readers to consider how agency operates through unexpected mediums.

Central to Tompkins’ analysis is a critique of how colonialism and capitalism enforce hierarchical distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable forms of materiality. For example, she examines how racialized and queer bodies have historically been rendered as "excessive" or "monstrous" through the lens of material deviance, tying these perceptions to broader systems of exploitation and marginalization.

Ultimately, Deviant Matter pushes against conventional readings of material culture, urging scholars to attend to the radical potentialities of deviance. By reclaiming deviance as a site of resistance, Tompkins reimagines how matter—whether flesh, food, or object—can unsettle dominant power structures. This work stands as a testament to her innovative interdisciplinary scholarship, which continues to inspire critical rethinking of the material world and its socio-political entanglements.

As a queer person I really liked the inclusion of queer/feminist multimedia such as literature and historical documents that prove the author's theory of queer of color method as political and disiplinary critique through the genelogy of all related areas. This was something I was deeply unaware of prior to receiving this arc and was interesting to learn about.

This was so insanely dense that I genuinely forgot the meaning of words (and that was just the introduction!). What an absolutely fascinating subject that I was SO looking forward to reading, but ultimately the academese diluted any meaning I could have gleaned from the book. Did not finish.

Deviant Matter by Kyla Wazana Tompkins is a work that seems to present some ideas we have largely confronted (for me, primarily through Foucault) but expanded from the extremely macro level to the micro level. Combined with considering matter that might change shape and state and that often elicit strong reactions from people, we are tasked with understanding how changes in scientific methods and processes have been appropriated to maintain marginalized populations at the periphery of society and culture.

I am going to state up front that I am going to need a couple more times through the book to grasp even a fair amount of the nuance. That said, the bigger picture, if I am seeing the picture correctly, is quite accessible with some effort. Because of that I am not going to offer much detailed commentary beyond my opening paragraph, you need to read the book to get what matters most to you from what is offered.

What I want to say here has more to do with the effect the book has had in just the couple of days since I finished it. In some ways a book that presents the reader with a new perspective through which to view future events has done its job.

I was looking through some open access books and a couple of passages stuck out because of having read Deviant Matter. First, in the abstract for The French Invention of Menopause and the Medicalization of Women's Ageing by Alison M Downham Moore, the following sentence seems to speak, at least in part, to the processes discussed in Deviant Matters. "Older women were identified as an important patient cohort for the expanding medicalisation of French society and were advised to entrust themselves to the hygienic care of doctors in managing the whole era of life from around and after the final cessation of menses." We have the institutionalizing of medicine, and, as the rest of the abstract mentions, the marriage of medicine and politics. Equally curious when considered alongside Deviant Matter is the following sentence. "It tells a complex story of how women’s ageing featured in the demographic revolution in modern science, in the denigration of folk medicine, in the unique French field of hygiène, and in the fixation on women in the emergence of modern psychiatry."

Second, in the abstract for Medicine in an Age of Revolution by Peter Elmer, we have several sentences which address similar ideas. The one that best sums up the strands of the argument follows. "The body politic, a Renaissance commonplace, was now peopled by medical practitioners who often claimed a special authority when it came to diagnosing the ills of late seventeenth-century society." Even going further back we have a medical/scientific approach to describing and "diagnosing" societal "ills."

I apologize if you were hoping for a nice summary of the book's thesis, I'm afraid that is a bit beyond my ability right now. The sentence in my opening paragraph gives a broad description. If you're looking for a work that might be a little challenging, and maybe a little slow at first, but offers you plenty to consider about how we use words and concepts, often without realizing it, to contribute to the marginalization of groups of people you will be richly rewarded with this book. I hope my examples give you an idea of what types of things may stand out for you to consider after you've finished this book.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

This book wasn't necessarily what I was looking for, but I really appreciated the work and research that was done by the author to bring forward such a distinct and relevant point of view.