Cleanliness

Overthink

Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D.

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Education

4.7 • 549 Ratings

🗓️ 22 April 2025

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Episode 128 – Cleanliness

How often should you shower to remain ‘clean’? How many times can you re-wear your jeans before they are considered ‘dirty’? In episode 128 of Overthink, Ellie and David take a look at cleanliness. They get into how humans have turned cleanliness into an art, and maybe even an obsession. Why are we so bothered by dirt? What is dirt, anyways? How are notions of dirtiness and cleanliness even into our symbolic systems, including language and religion? And what is up with TikTok’s obsession with the Clean Girl Aesthetic? As they tackle these questions, your hosts also explore the historical weaponisation of the concept of cleanliness against marginalised groups, such as queer people and people of color. In the bonus, Ellie and David discuss cleanliness as a social construct, the link between it and isolation, and Michel Serres’s ‘excremental theory’ of private property.

Works Discussed:
Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance
Dana Berthold, “Tidy Whiteness: A Genealogy of Race, Purity, and Hygiene”
L’Oreal Blackett, “In The “Hygiene Olympics” Black Folks Always Win — But Aren’t We Tired?”
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger
Virginia Smith, Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity

Support the show

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Overthink.
0:16.2	The podcast where your two favorite philosophy professors, we hope, trace big ideas in our everyday life and the history of philosophy.
0:23.7	I am Dr. David Peña-Gusman.
0:25.7	And I'm Dr. Eli, As you know, I go to one of the gayest gyms in the world.
0:34.0	Do I know this? Is it an equinox?
0:35.9	It's not equinox. That's like the busiest one. I go to the gayest one.
0:39.2	It's a gym in the center of the Castro district in San Francisco that is frequented primarily by gay men.
0:45.8	Let's be honest, the Venn diagram of bougie and gay in major cities is sometimes a circle.
0:51.4	It is very much a circle in some cases. Anyway, sorry, go ahead. So you're in the Castro.
0:56.6	Yeah, I'm in the Castro at the center of this circle that is a Venn diagram. And there is a guy that
1:03.4	frequents this gym that a lot of other people know about because this guy smells horribly.
1:16.5	Everybody kind of scurries away when he arrives to work out next to them.
1:19.0	Better or worse than that one guy in grad school?
1:20.3	Wait, what guy?
1:22.5	Name redacted.
1:26.8	Way worse.
1:28.1	Oh, okay, okay. Yeah, because this guy, people wouldn't really want to sit next to it at the seminar table. Yeah, okay, okay.
1:28.8	Yeah, because this guy,
1:30.6	people wouldn't really want to sit next to it at the seminar table.
1:35.4	Yeah, no, no, this is a guy whom I've since learned,
1:38.5	since encountering him, that this is his kink. He has a sexual relationship to body odors, and he really likes to cultivate his own.
1:46.4	So he goes to the gym without showering before or after.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D., and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D. and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.