Against abjection.

This article is about the theoretical life of `the abject'. It focuses on the ways in which Anglo-American and Australian feminist theoretical accounts of maternal bodies and identities have utilized Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection. Whilst the abject has proved a compelling and productive concept for feminist theory, this article cautions against the repetition of the maternal (as) abject within theoretical writing. It argues that employing a Kristevan abject paradigm risks reproducing, rather than challenging, histories of violent disgust towards maternal bodies. In place of the Kristevan model of the abject, it argues for a more thoroughly social and political account of abjection. This entails a critical shift from the current feminist theoretical preoccupation with the `transgressive potentiality' of `encounters with the abject' to a consideration of consequences of being abject within specific social and political locations

Borderline bodies

This chapter is about borders that are made and broken at gay pride parades. Specifically, I examine the discursive and material borders maintained in tourism discourse. Binary oppositions such as self/other, straight/gay, and tourist/host provide a focus for this chapter. I am interested in where these borders wear thin and threaten to break and disrupt social order. I explore the bodies of gay pride parades because it is bodies such as these that threaten the borders of corporeal acceptability

Consumed by the real: A conceptual framework of abjective consumption and its freaky vicissitudes

Purpose – This paper furnishes an inaugural reading of abjective consumption by drawing on Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory of abjection within the wider terrain of consumer cultural research. It offers a conceptual framework that rests on three pillars, viz. irrationality, meaninglessness, dissolution of selfhood. Design/methodology/approach – Qualitative research design that adopts a documentary ethnographic approach, by drawing on a corpus of 50 documentary episodes from the TV series “My Strange Addiction” and “Freaky Eaters”. Findings – The findings from this analysis point to different orders of mediatized discourse that are simultaneously operative in different actors’ frames (e.g. moralizing, medical), in Goffman’s terms, yet none of which attains to address the phenomenon of abjective consumption to its fullblown extent. Research limitations/implications – Although some degree of bias is bound to be inherent in the data because of their pre-recorded status, they are particularly useful not in the least because this is a “difficult sample” in qualitative methodological terms. Practical implications – The multi-order dimensionalization of abjective consumption opens up new vistas to marketers in terms of adding novel dimensions to the message structure of their communicative programs, in line with the three Lacanian orders. Social implications – The adoption of a consumer psychoanalytic perspective allows significant others to fully dimensionalize the behavior of abjective consumption subjects, by becoming sensitive to other than symbolic aspects that are endemic in consumer behavior. Originality/value – This paper contributes to the extant consumer cultural research literature by furnishing the novel conceptual framework of abjective consumption, as a further elaboration of my consumer psychoanalytic approach to jouissance consumption, as well as by contrasting this interpretive frame vis-à-vis dominant discursive regimes

Abjection and Sexually Specific Violence in Doris Lessing’s The Cleft

The article applies selected concepts from the writings of Julia Kristeva to the analysis of a novel by Doris Lessing entitled The Cleft. Published in 2007, The Cleft depicts the origin of sexual difference in the human species. Its emergence is fraught with anxiety and sexually specific violence, and invites comparison with the primal separation from the mother and the emancipation of the subject in process at the cost of relegating the maternal to the abject in the writings of Julia Kristeva. Lessing creates an ahistorical community of females (Clefts) from which the male community (Squirts) eventually evolves. The growing awareness of sexual difference dovetails with the emotional and intellectual development, as the nascent human subject gradually enters linear time viewed from perspective by the narrator of the novel, a Roman senator who hoards ancient manuscripts with the story of Clefts and Squirts. The article juxtaposes the ideas of Lessing and Kristeva, who have both cut themselves off from feminism, and have both been inspired by psychoanalysis. Primarily, Lessing’s fictional imaginary can be adequately interpreted in light of Kristeva’s concept of abjection as an element that disturbs the system. My interpretation of abjection is indebted to Pamela Sue Anderson’s reading of Kristeva, notably her contention that violence as a response to sexual difference lies at the heart of collective identity. Finally, the imaginary used by Lessing and Kristeva is shown to have stemmed from the colonial imaginary like the concepts of Freud and Jung

Convention, Repetition and Abjection: The Way of the Gothic

This paper employs Deleuze and Kristeva in an examination of certain Gothic conventions. It argues that repetition of these conventions- which endows Gothicism with formulaic coherence and consistence but might also lead to predictability and stylistic deadlock-is leavened by a novelty that Deleuze would categorize as literary “gift.” This particular kind of “gift” reveals itself in the fiction of successive Gothic writers on the level of plot and is applied to the repetition of the genre’s motifs and conventions. One convention, the supernatural, is affiliated with “the Other” in the early stages of the genre’s development and can often be seen as mapping the same territories as Kristeva’s abject. The lens of Kristeva’s abjection allows us to internalize the Other and thus to reexamine the Gothic self; it also allows us to broaden our understanding of the Gothic as a commentary on the political, the social and the domestic. Two early Gothic texts, Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Lewis’s The Monk, are presented as examples of repetition of the Gothic convention of the abjected supernatural, Walpole’s story revealing horrors of a political nature, Lewis’s reshaping Gothic’s dynamics into a commentary on the social and the domestic

What I could make of mothering: matricentric puppetry and the mothers of the bestiary

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