A paradigm-shifting work of queer theory that offers insight into the messy, incoherent workings of the human psyche and reframes the centrality of filth in our social and political consciousness.

What is filthy psychology? In contrast to all things normative, regulated, and confined to clean categories, Filthy Psychology proposes a different mode of engagement with the politics of feeling and thinking from the forefront of queer studies and the movement for trans liberation in Brazil.

Dr. Sofia Favero’s proposal is pungent, provocative, and powerful. Her aim is nothing less than a full-bodied reimagining of the language and symbols that have come to define what it means to analyze feelings and thoughts, especially the most abject and sublimated. Disgust, rage, shame, fear, guilt. Can alternative destinies exist for the complex emotional experiences that often go hand in hand with marginalization and exclusion? Can they, in fact, teach us how to combat oppression?

Dialoguing with a range of theoretical, historical, and pop cultural frameworks, Favero’s work calls for a strategic reimagining of the psy-sciences that reckons with the quotidian humiliation, macro- and micro-aggression, and other psychological pressures faced by people who do not conform to societal expectations.

From the clinic to the classroom, from the halls of power to the underground rave, filth becomes an ethical and intellectual lens through which we can begin to dismantle our collective investments in the rigid morality embedded in the discourses around power, gender, and sexuality. Filthy Psychology celebrates disruption, imperfection, and excrement. You are invited to get filthy. Brace yourself. Get ready for the mess. And prepare to confront the real power of the repulsive. It may reprogram everything you thought you knew. You’ve been warned.

Sofia Favero is a psychologist, a writer, and an activist. She is a founding member of the Association for Trans and Travesti Movement in Sergipe, Brazil. Favero earned her doctorate in social and institutional psychology from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, and she is the author of several books on gender and sexuality. Filthy Pyschology is her English-language debut. She lives in São Paulo.

Bruna Barros is a translator, multidisciplinary artist, and researcher. They’re also known as mercúrio. Barros is a former member of the research group Translating in the Black Atlantic, half of the translationart collective cocoruto art duo, a member of the multidisciplinary artistic platform PIRA, and a member of the Indocile Bodies and Free Minds collective. Barros is a graduate student in the literature and culture program of the Federal University of Bahia, where they research the translation of Black Brazilian Portuguese poetry into English.