'StigmatoCortex: Disgust, Discrimination & Dehumanization' with Nishita Rao

StigmatoCortex: Disgust, Discrimination & Dehumanization

Let_it_Reign Individual Events

Facilitator: Nishita Rao

Date and Time

- 14 November 2025, 4:00 PM PST

- EST: 7:00 PM

- SAST: 2:00 AM (15 November 2025)

- Format: Online class (details to join provided upon registration)

What it’s about

Disgust is not just about spoiled food—it’s a deep-rooted emotional and neural response tied to how humans regulate morality, identity, and social order. StigmatoCortex investigates how this primal affect becomes entangled with implicit bias, dehumanization, and structural discrimination. Anchored in affective neuroscience, the session traces the roles of the anterior insula (core disgust processing), amygdala (threat and fear detection), medial prefrontal cortex (moral reasoning and regulation), and occipital regions (visual racial encoding) in the perception of disgust and otherness.

Drawing from neuroimaging research, including racial bias studies, this session maps how disgust is internalized during early development and later weaponized against marginalized communities, including queer, disabled, racialized, and kink-identified bodies. Disgust not only disrupts relationships but also quietly upholds systems of shame and exclusion. This session offers both a theoretical and embodied approach to begin deconstructing this pattern.

The workshop component explores how disgust takes root in the brain and then shapes how we see ourselves and others. How do the body parts we associate with shame or disgust show up in kink or intimate play? How do we eroticize, reclaim, or reframe these sites of stigma? And how might this re-pattern our emotional and neural relationship to those parts of ourselves?

By combining neuroscience with creative embodiment, StigmatoCortex offers a powerful, accessible pathway to rewire personal and collective patterns of shame, stigma, and internalized disgust.

What you’ll explore

- The science of disgust: affective neuroscience foundations and the brain regions involved (anterior insula, amygdala, mPFC, occipital regions)

- How disgust interfaces with implicit bias, dehumanization, and structural discrimination

- Developmental pathways: how disgust is internalized early and weaponized later

- The social scope: impact on queer, disabled, racialized, and kink-identified bodies

- Embodiment and reclamation: mapping disgust sites in the body, and exploring eroticizing, reclaiming, or reframing these sites

- Practical pathways to re-pattern shame and disgust in self and in our communities

Who should join

- Anyone curious about how emotions shape morality, identity, and social order

- Students and professionals in neuroscience, psychology, sex education, social justice, and related fields

- Individuals exploring embodiment practices, sexuality, kink, or intimate relationships with attention to stigma and internalized disgust

Registration and access

- Platform: Online (registration details provided after enrollment)

- Accessibility: The session is designed to be accessible to a broad audience with practical, embodied exercises

- Note: Topics include discussions of stigma, sexuality, and embodied experiences of shame; participants should proceed with consent and personal safety in mind

Facilitator: Nishita Rao

Nishita Rao is a Behavioral Neuroscience Counselor, an Interdisciplinary Sex Researcher, Reiki Grandmaster, and a Certified Sex Educator (ISEE and AASECT—the first Indian to be certified as CSE). She brings a background in Behavioral Neuroendocrinology (MS Neuroscience) and Genetics (BE Biotechnology). Her practice integrates Eastern and Western modalities, blending Attachment-Based Therapy, Emotionally Focused Therapy, MBCT, Trauma-Focused Interventions, Integrative Therapy, and Person-Centered Therapy with Mandala Art Therapy, Carnatic Music Therapy, Bibliotherapy, Pranayama, Aromatherapy, Usui/Jikiden Reiki, Karuna Reiki, Seichem Reiki, Chakra Balancing, Body Mapping, Tea Blending Therapy, and more.

As an interdisciplinary researcher, her work spans Neuroscience, Genetics, Anthropology, Psychology, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Linguistics, and Biopolitics. Current research explores post-colonial imprints on human social and sexual attitudes. She is a decolonial dance ethnographer focusing on Belly dance, Sadir, Bharatanatyam, Mohiniyatam, Kathak, and Kathakalli, with a scholarly lens on how sex negativity appears in Tantric Carnatic Sanskrit renditions. She also analyzes sexual politics surrounding Chamunda sculptures (the Crone Tantra Goddess).

Nishita is the founder of Pillow Talk With Nixi, and leads initiatives including:

- InclusiSex Studies Initiative

- Curious Research Cortex

- Applied Neuroscience Consulting

- Soul Sync Sanctuary

- Sex Scholars Library

- Sexual Revolution

- South Asian Sexuality Professionals

Socials

- Website: https://www.pillowtalkwithnixi.com/

- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pillowtalkwithnixi/