The Abject Body Research Papers (original) (raw)

- by and +1
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- The Abject Body, Julia Kristeva, Post-Partum Depression, Gothic Fiction

The immune system is built from our cells, organs, proteins and tissue, and it is the sum of the whole that defends the body against illness. In this paper, we introduce the immune system as a site to explore morethan-human design. Specifically, we address the effects of chronic stress on the immune system to explore a set of speculative wearable designs that combine the microbial basis of the human body with that of morethan-human. We reflect on the relationships within living materials and discuss symbiosis and mutualistic care when designing alternative wearable artifacts and trackers. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Interaction design.

- by Teresa Almeida
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- Design, Biomaterials, Interaction Design, Chronic Pain

Hans Baldung Grien, the most famous apprentice and close friend of German artist Albrecht Dürer, was known for his unique and highly eroticised images of witches. In paintings and woodcut prints, he gave powerful visual expression to late medieval tropes and stereotypes, such as the poison maiden, venomous virgin, the Fall of Man, 'death and the maiden' and other motifs and eschatological themes, which mingled abject and erotic qualities in the female body.

- by Yvonne Owens
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- Gender Studies, Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, Renaissance History

This paper examines how the novel Let the Right One In (2004) by John Ajvide Lindqvist and the 2008 film of the same name directed by Tomas Alfredson, utilize the vampiric monster as a means of showing the abjection inherent in transgressing the body. The novel achieves this end through the use of different themes, such as the constant threat of the infected body, the way in which fluids are used to transgress the human body and the role that mutilation plays in punishing the body that gets too close to the abject. The paper hopes to show that rather than being the original source of transgression and defilement, transgressive bodies were created as a response to violations and transgressions that initially occurred against them.

- by Milena Milojicic
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- The Abject Body, Abjection, Julia Kristeva, Monsters and Monster Theory
- by Christine Harold
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- Visual Rhetoric, The Abject Body, Abjection, Drugs and Popular Culture

This article examines Francesca Woodman and Rebecca Horn's oeuvre, establishing connections between their work, their work and their biographies, their artworks and their selves. In their art practices, they create prison-like and claustrophobic environments that reflect their inner selves, their traumas and their anxieties. Through the embodiment of space, they portray themselves, thus blurring the limits between inner self and outer world, between body and space. By closely analysing their work and their lives, this article sets forth the idea that their work can be read as a dynamic and visual autobiography, as kinetic and psychological self-portraits of these two female artists.

- by Jessica Janeiro Obernyer and +1
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- Self and Identity, Photography, Phenomenology, Performance Art
- by Michael Amy
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- Art History, Art, Installation Art, Contemporary Art
- by Michael Amy
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- Cyborg Theory, Installation Art, Contemporary Art, Installation (Art)

In the appropriately titled A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois’s lust infested lifestyle, and her promiscuous behavior led to a tragic fall. A once pure hearted girl from the Old South aristocracy of Louisiana takes refuge in her sister’s home in New Orleans, where she meets her brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Tennessee Williams introduces themes such abjection, desire and gender roles and the challenge of survival in a changing world. In what follows, is an exploration of key events that led to her nervous breakdown, drawing back on psychoanalysis to elaborate on how Blanche’s traumatic life experiences negates the shell that encompasses her morbid livelihood.

- by Abderrahman Alamrani
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- Literary Criticism, The Abject Body, Abjection
- by Deborah Lupton
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- Sociology, Medical Sociology, Anthropology of the Body, Obesity

In this paper we propose to look into
different meanings of livability and life in Judith
butler’s thought. Although crucial for her early
work (she points to it in her 1999 Introduction to
Gender Trouble), the concept of livability as
such emerges more often and in a more pronounced
manner in her later books (from Undoing
Gender and Precarious life to Towards a
Performative Theory of Assembly). Our main
question is: what is the thread that runs through
different concepts of life in butler’s work? What
are the links between abject, unlivable, precarious,
ungrievable, jettisoned and dispossessed
life? this raises further questions: the question of
gradation of livability (which life matters and
‘how much’, and how to think this quantifiability
of something so unquantifiable); and the
question of universality (all lives matter). these
questions obviously need to take into account the
terms under which a life is qualified and counted
as livable. such conditions encompass the norms
that organize the possibility of recognition and
the orders of recognizability and differential allocation
of humanness. they encompass the
ways in which we are constituted politically, but
also in which this ‘we’ is social and bodily. the
question of livable life is thus very much entangled
with the issue of (individual) agency, but
also with what we as agents require “in order to
maintain and reproduce the conditions of (our)
own livability”.

- by Adriana Zaharijević and +1
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- Feminist Theory, Queer Theory, Feminist Philosophy, The Abject Body

ÇAĞDAŞ BİR EĞİLİM OLARAK ABJECT ART (İĞRENÇ SANAT) Öz 20. yüzyılın ikinci yarısı sanat alanında, dönemin sosyokültürel ortamıyla bağlantılı olarak izleyicide şok etkisi yapacak konuların ve malzemelerin kullanılmaya baş-landığı bir dönemdir. Daha önceki dönemlerde sanatsal bir form olarak sanatçıla-rın çözmeye uğraştığı beden, doksanlı yıllardan itibaren sınırları, geçiciliği, atıkları ile keşfedilecek yeni bir alan olarak sanat nesnesi konumuna geçmiştir. Kriste-va'nın Lacan ve Bataille gibi yazarların çalışmalarından yola çıkarak oluşturduğu " abjection " kavramından harekete geçen sanatçılar, sanatsal üretimlerinde, toplum-dan dışlananları olduğu kadar izleyicide tiksinti uyandıran bedensel sıvıları kul-lanmalarıyla da ön plana çıkmaktadırlar. Bu türden eserler üreten sanatçıların este-tik anlayışını tanımlamak için Abject Art (İğrenç Sanat) deyimi kullanıma sokul-muştur. Kristeva'ya göre abject (iğrenç olan) sınırları ihlal eder, düzeni ve otorite-yi rahatsız eder. Abject Art başlığı altında incelenebilecek sanatçılar da genellikle kadın sorunları, annelik, cinsiyet rolleri, beden gibi konulara provokatif bir dille yaklaşmakta ve toplumsal ret ile karşılanan olgulara dikkat çekmektedirler. Sınırla-rın gittikçe belirsizleştiği ve tabuların yıkıldığı bir çağda sanatta yıkıcı ve sarsıcı eğilimlerin ortaya çıkması ve bu vesileyle sanatın tanımı, sınırları ya da sınırsızlığı ile ilgili tartışmalara yön vermesi oldukça doğaldır.

- by Hatice Dogan
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- Contemporary Art, The Abject Body, Julia Kristeva, Abject Art

Accusations of witchcraft throughout early modern England were evidence of a popular imagination which understood sin within frameworks of tainted bodies bound by gender and sexuality. This study examines the increased anxieties and corresponding witch-panics of the English Civil War throughout the early seventeenth century. It is informed by deposition records of 1600-1649 throughout the eastern counties, including Essex, Kent, Suffolk, and Sussex. I argue the gendered body becomes the site of individual and social corruption. Described as teats, the physical marks of “suckling familiars” (Impes) became definitive of English evidentiary practice. Records reveal inspections validated accusations of nighttime copulation with the Devil (sexual) and suckling imps (maternal) with the payment of blood. Drawing from medieval humoral theory, blood and milk are not only one and the same, but more broadly representative of the Witch’s immutable corruption and that of the nurturing Mother. These transgressions occurred predominately in the domestic sphere and were perpetuated therein. The Witch was constructed as a foil to the hegemonic expectations of early modern gender roles and as a tool in policing processes of asserting proper behaviour. I present the early modern woman, designated as producer – of children, of the household, and of the dominant faith – we see inverted in the characterization of the Witch. I am concerned then not only with the gender and body of a witch itself, but further discourses around this body as a signifier of health in the processes of nation-making. Following Joane Nagel: women served as “biological producers of collectivities [and] as reproducers of the [normative] boundaries of ethnic/national groups [and] ideological reproduction”. It is this reproductive capacity in particular which reveals anxieties around the figure of the Witch. Their corruptive bodies were thus conceived as vehicles of magical violence, heresy, and corruption throughout the body politic.

- by Leyla Pavão Chisamore
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- Gender History, Medieval Science, The Body, The Abject Body
- by Joy van Lieshout
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- Critical Theory, Philosophy, Aristotle, The Abject Body

"Abstract
Through an analysis of his lived narratives, the author discusses the formative experiences some preadolescent boys have with nudity/nakedness as well as the initial experiences young male art students and teachers have with the nude in academia, in order to examine how heteronormative ideas about sex—gender and professionalism—limit the possibility of rich educational experiences, affecting both educators and students. The conclusion of this study involves a discussion of the benefits of more inclusive examinations of the various conditions, frameworks, and approaches to interpreting the nude with a focus on specific works of art.
"

- by shbey@syr.edu Bey
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- The Body, The Abject Body, Art Education, Nudity (Culture)

The authors of this edition propose a novel and inspiring research approach to the subject of plants, which – being a form of life that is different, yet akin to us – is a constant source of nourishment and metaphors, decoration and obsessions. The articles included in this thematic block on plants enter into lively ongoing debates on genetics, feminism, ecology and plant ontology. They are excellent examples of the fact that in Polish philosophical and cultural reflection there was an understanding very early on of the challenges that posthumanism poses to our anthropocentric intellectual habits. Foreign readers will recognize in these Polish reflections a bold willingness to ask ethical and aesthetic questions of great relevance to the modern world that go far beyond the safe, though most likely imagined, limits of what it is to be human.

- by Andrzej Marzec
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- Critical Theory, Biochemistry, Botany, Landscape Ecology

This mini-dissertation serves as a framework for my own creative practice. In this
research paper my intention is to explore, within a feminist reading, representations of
the female corpse in fashion photography and art. The cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s
theories on the concept of representation are utilised to critically analyse and
interogate selected images from fashion magazines, which depicts the female corpse
in an idealised way. Such idealisation manifests in Western culture, in fashion
magazines, as expressed in depictions of the attractive/ seductive/fine-looking female
corpse. Fashion photographs that fit this description are critically contrasted and
challenged to selected artworks by Penny Siopis and Marlene Dumas, alongside my
own work, to explore how the female corpse can be represented, as strategy to
undermine the aesthetic and cultural objectification of the female body. Here the
study also explores the selected artists’ utilisation of the abject and the grotesque in
relation to their use of artistic mediums and modes of production as an attempt to
create ambiguous and conflicting combinations of attraction and repulsion (the
sublime aesthetic of delightful horror), thereby confronting the viewer with the notion
of the objectification of the decease[d] feminine body as object to-be-looked-at. This
necessitated the inclusion of seminal theories developed by the French theorist, Julia
Kristeva (1982) on the abject and the Russian theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin (1968) on the
grotesque.

- by Thelma Van Rensburg
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- Forensic Science, Fashion Photography, Ideology, The Abject Body

Artykuł stanowi analizę wybranych utworów Anny Świrszczyńskiej pod kątem motywów transgresyjnych powiązanych z cielesnością, oraz – szerzej – z dychotomią ciało/dusza i jej różnorodnymi implikacjami. Podstawowym celem artykułu jest naszkicowanie wstępu do kompleksowej analizy poetyk/polityk cielesności w wierszach Świrszczyńskiej, przy szczególnym wzięciu pod uwagę niejednorodności podejść artystyczno-filozoficznych do tej tematyki w dziele poetki.

Examines how the body - its organs, limbs, viscera - was represented in the literature and culture of early modern Europe. How and why did 16th and 17th century medical, religious, and literary texts portray the body part by part, rather than as an entity? And what does this view of the human body tell us about society's view of part and whole, of individual and universal in the early modern period? As this volume demonstrates, the symbolics of body parts challenges our assumptions about "the body" as a fundamental Renaissance image of self, society, and nation. The book presents work by: Nancy Vickers on corporeal fragments; Peter Stallybrass on the foot; Marjorie Garber on joints; Stephen Greenblatt on bodily marking and mutilation; Gail Kern Paster on the nervous system; Michael Schoenfeldt on the belly; Jeffrey Masten on the anus; Katherine Park on the clitoris; Kathryn Schwartz on the breast; Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky on the eye; Katherine Rowe on the hands; Scott Stevens on the heart and brain; Carla Mazzio on the tongue; and David Hillman on the entrails.An examination of how the body--its organs, limbs, and viscera--were represented in the literature and culture of early modern Europe. This provocative volume demonstrates, the symbolism of body parts challenge our assumptions about "the body" as a fundamental Renaissance image of self, society, and nation. This book was awarded The English Association Beatrice White Book Prize in 1999.

- by Carla Mazzio
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- Religion, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Medical Anthropology

From the pages of Elena Ferrante’s quartet entitled L’amica geniale, the Neapolitan neighborhood of Rione Luzzatti emerges as a contaminating urban space that infects the lives of those who live within its perimeter. My reading of the Neapolitan cycle explores the abjective power of the material world over the human, that is to say, its ability to cast the human into the realm of the abject. Naples’s material agency blurs clear- cut divisions of bodily, moral, and relational configurations. Prevented from escaping the abject magnetism of the city’s centripetal force, Ferrante’s characters experience smarginatura, the blurring of the material borders that define the individual and that distinguish between human and non-human, the self and the other. This undoing ultimately exposes the frailty of corporeal borders and social and moral constructs.

- by Matheus Araujo dos Santos
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- Psychoanalysis, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Philosophy
- by Belle DuVall
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- Media Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, Film Studies, Visual Culture

Monstrous seduction, in this sense, is a discursive, material and embodied practice that reifies boundaries and surfaces around taxonomic and textual lines, so much so that the seduction of Monster High consumers may be reliant on supplementing the act of embracing difference with the process of interpreting difference. And although the Monster High collection purports to challenge the politics of disability disclosure with their doll’s overt developmental differences, the discursive technology that re-produces conditions for empathizing with embodied Others also replicates the modes of singling out difference. Monstrous seduction, then, relies on the queer intersections rooted in our childhood attachment to not only the dolls’ surfaces and their narratives but to the 'pleasurable Ugliness' that is all too very familiar to us: ourselves.

- by Cathy T Thomas
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- The Abject Body, Pleasure, The Monstrous and Otherness, Black Girlhood Studies

George R. R. Martin's fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire and its television adaptation Game of Thrones have achieved immense popularity in the last decade and increasing attention within the academy. Several scholars have examined how women are constructed in the series, many of whom argue that audiences, meanings, and conventions have profound effects upon how readers are invited to view and (re)imagine femininity and femaleness. However, female masculinities have been marginalised in these discussions, which have maintained a link between female bodies and femininity that feminist and queer scholars have problematised. Using Barbara Creed's work on the monstrous feminine, J. Halberstam's concept of female masculinity, and Raewyn Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity, I argue that certain masculine women are aligned with monstrosity, and that this embodiment of masculinity is used to critique violent and dominating masculine performances. Given the series' mass appeal and popular culture's role in shaping attitudes and values, the problematization of destructive masculinities has the potential to subvert currently accepted constructs of masculinity.

- by Tobi Evans
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- Psychoanalysis, Gender Studies, Media Studies, Feminist Theory
- by kayla Izikowitz
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- Philosophy, The Abject Body, Abjection, Metaphorical Thinking

The sexually abused adolescent body is quintessentially abject. Where voluntary sexual activity is often troped in literature as marking the end of childhood and entry into adulthood, the involuntary sexuality of father-daughter incest places the victim outside the semiotic order. She is no longer a child, yet she is also not an adult. More monstrous than human, the sexually abused adolescent body fills its perceiver with horror and yet it is endlessly fascinating. Incest is a source of such shame that it is perhaps the greatest of all sexual secrets. And precisely because it is such a closely guarded secret, even amongst adults, it fascinates us even whilst we are disgusted by it. Victims of incest are treated with a special deference: they know secrets about adult sexuality that most adults do not. This degree of knowledge destroys distinctions between children and adults that claim to be based on knowledge. So writing about incest is characterised by ambivalence between the desire to know more and the horror of knowing more.
This paper will examine the ways in which Push by Sapphire represents the body of an incestuously abused adolescent body. The novel also shows how an adolescent’s race, body size and pregnancy can be perceived as monstrous. By probing the characteristics of the horror Precious’s body incites, the paper aims to expose the power play behind such representations, and show how politically motivated writers like Sapphire may work within the tradition to expose the mind set which supports the maintenance of these views.

- by Lydia Kokkola
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- Sexual Abuse, Children's Literature, The Abject Body, Teenage Pregnancy
- by Louise Viljoen
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- The Body, The Abject Body, The Grotesque Body, Modern Poetry
- by Harry O . Maier
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- New Testament, Early Christianity, Biblical Studies, The Abject Body

This article reads two poems by the African American writer Elizabeth Alexander as examples of post-colonial feminist critique centered around the question of historical misrepresentation of the black female body. Her poems selected for this study refer to, or signify on, the discursive and representational practices of reducing non-white women to the role of (not necessarily sexual) objects, commonly employed by the predominantly white and male Western culture from the very first colonial encounters onwards. This process of “fetishization” can be viewed in relation to the much broader category of “otherization” of black females in a society guided by both phallo- and Eurocentric values, in which – while their physicality and sexuality is often overexposed – they become nearly invisible as human agents and subjects. The primary aim of this article is to analyze Alexander's poetic presentation of the processes of racialization/eroticization of two iconic “black female bodies” – Saartjie Baartman and Josephine Baker.

- by Marta Werbanowska
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- American History, Gender Studies, Women's Studies, Popular Music
- by Julia Leyda
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- Television Studies, The Abject Body, Abjection, U.S. Television Studies
- by Joss Kelly
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- The Abject Body, Gothic Literature, Gothic Studies, Sigmund Freud

Głównym celem artykułu jest zbadanie źródeł zjawiska skandalu w sztuce współczesnej oraz zaprezentowanie w tym kontekście artystycznych działań Abnormals Gallery. Wychodząc od założeń psychoanalizy lacanowskiej przyglądam się dwóm strategiom posługiwania się perwersją w sztuce, mającym na celu wyrażenie sprzeciwu wobec Prawa Ojca. Męska twórczość (père-version) polega na tworzeniu alternatywnej wizji świata, będącej infantylną karykaturą ojcowskiego porządku. Natomiast kobieca działalność artystyczna (père-aversion) ujawnia się w radykalnym, gwałtownym zerwaniu z opresyjnym porządkiem patriarchalnym za pomocą cielesności. Następnie przedstawiam zjawisko Abnormals Gallery, której funkcjonowanie w specyficzny sposób żywi się skandalem. Opisuję zatem cielesne performance’y Lukasa Zpiry, spreparowane zwłoki zwierząt Iris Schieferstein, kontrowersyjne, zanurzone w popkulturze prace Maxa Papeschiego oraz fotografie Michela Valentino.

- by Andrzej Marzec
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- Philosophy, Aesthetics, Art History, Performing Arts

"In this paper, through an examination of mostly British make-over television programs we examine how the feminine has become a new site of limitless possibility and endless consumption, the fulcrum of intensifying processes of neo-liberal reinvention of continuously making over the self into successful, post-feminist bourgeois subjects. We argue that the central premise of contemporary make-over programs is the question: “Is the transformation of abject subjects possible?” We also suggest the focal object of transformation in many shows is the working class woman who fails both as subject/object of self-reflexivity, desire, and consumption. We argue it is her mind and body that represents a core site of abjection—a subjectivity designated as uninhabitable and therefore also a central site of regulation. It is upon the working class woman’s
mind and body that the drama of possibility and limitation of neo-liberal reinvention is played out. We also argue that it is perhaps in reference to that which is made abject and uninhabitable that it becomes possible to talk about class as a dynamic of identifying against what we must not be, and which fuels incessant attempts to refashion selves into generalized and normalized bourgeois
feminine subjects."

- by Jessica Ringrose
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- Critical Psychology, Working Class Consciousness, The Abject Body, Abjection

The land/woman metaphor has always been an effective tool to define Ireland and Irish nationalists aligned their feminized land with patriarchal discourse and created the iconic Mother Ireland in the image of the Virgin Mary. Known for his anti-Revivalist arguments, James Joyce reveals that the cult of Mother Ireland must be demolished to reach the essence of Irish identity hidden in the "abject" maternal body. Therefore, in his struggle against colonialism, Joyce turns his attention to women, believing that Irishness starts with the exploration of a woman's body. Using Kristeva's abjection theory to re-interpret Joyce's position as the "abject" child of Irish literature, this paper aims to analyze the writer's prominent women characters in Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and in Ulysses in parallel to his search for an identity as an Irish writer and his anti-colonial struggle against patriarchy.

- by Kübra Kangüleç
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- James Joyce, The Abject Body, Abjection
- by Basak Agin
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- The Abject Body, Agency, Twilight Saga, Human-Nonhuman relations

Un mundo de sombras camina a mi lado. Estudios críticos de la obra de Amparo Dávila. Coordinadores: Claudia L. Gutiérrez Piña, Jazmín G. Tapia Vázquez, Rogelio Castro Rocha. Guanajuato-México: Universidad de Guanajuato-Colofón, 2019.... more

- by Petra Báder
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- The Abject Body, Abjection, Cuerpo, Literatura Fantástica

This essay examines the work of Judith Butler in relation to corporeality through an analysis of politicized abjection. Abjection is considered in relation to bodily materia reality and proposed as the most promising path for a revamped corporate real politics. Through a reading of two novels, Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love Barbara Gowdy’s Mr. Sandman, the essay examines how the abject body can function as politically subversive. The essay analyzes Butler’s placing of the material body in a political domain, arguing Butler endorses materiality as potentially disruptive to the symbolic domain of viable bodies.

- by Natalie Wilson
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- Feminist Theory, Literature, Queer Theory, Sexuality

The character of Creighton Bernette on the HBO series Treme, in his excesses and abjection, embodies post-Katrina New Orleans in crucial ways: physical and emotional excesses become ways to distance his character from viewers, in ways... more

- by Julia Leyda
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- Television Studies, Disaster Studies, Fat Studies, The Abject Body

Kristeva describes abjection as ‘the repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck.’ Her account of the ‘abject’ has received a great deal of attention since the 1980s, in part due to high demand for theoretical attention to themes of purity and impurity, which remain important in contemporary society. Yet Kristeva, in 2004, herself has noted that ‘my investigation into abjection, violence and horror... picks up on a certain vacuum’, and other scholars have agreed that there is need for further work on what Campkin has described as an ‘under theorized’ topic. This article will begin by exploring the central line of criticism that has been made of Kristeva’s concept of abjection, before then considering an attempt by Goodnow to address these concerns through a re-reading of Kristeva. Goodnow’s re-reading of Kristeva, together with some conceptual clarifications from Hegel, will point the way towards a more precise account of purity and impurity. I shall contend that Kristeva’s work on social abjection sometimes hits upon a pattern, which greater conceptual precision will be able to revise into a new social theory of when and why themes of purity and impurity are invoked in Western societies. It will be argued that impure phenomena are those in which heterogeneity is seen to disturb a qualitative homogeneity, taken to be basic; pure phenomena are those understood to be all-of-a-piece and as a result identical with their essence.

- by Robbie Duschinsky
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- Discourse Analysis, Social Theory, Political Theory, Space and Place