This study examines how hunger narratives and performances contribute to a reconsideration of neglected or prohibited domains of thinking which only a full confrontation with the body's heterogeneity and plasticity can reveal. From literary motif or psychosomatic symptom to revolutionary gesture or existential malady, the double crux of hunger and disgust is a powerful force which can define the experience of embodiment. Kafka's fable of the "Hunger Artist" offers a matrix for the fast, while its surprising last-page revelation introduces disgust (...) as a correlative of abstinence, conscious or otherwise. Grounded in Kristeva's theory of abjection, the figure of the fraught body lurking at the heart of the negative grotesque gathers precision throughout this study, where it is employed in a widening series of contexts: suicide through overeating, starvation as self-performance or political resistance, the teratological versus the totalitarian, the anorexic harboring of death. In the process, writers and artists as diverse as Herman Melville, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Christina Rossetti, George Orwell, Knut Hamsun, J.M. Coetzee, Cindy Sherman, Pieter Breughel, Marina Abramovic, David Nebreda, Paul McCarthy, and others are brought into the discussion. By looking at the different acts of visceral, affective, and ideological resistance performed by the starving body, this book intensifies the relationship between hunger and disgust studies while offering insight into the modalities of the "dark grotesque" which inform the aesthetics and politics of hunger. It will be of value to anyone interested in the culture, politics, and subjectivity of embodiment, and scholars working within the fields of disgust studies, food studies, literary studies, cultural theory, and media studies. (shrink)

Should the remains of aborted fetuses be treated as human corpses or medical waste? How can feminists defend abortion rights without erasing the experiences of women who mourn fetal death or lending support to pro-life constructions of fetal personhood? To answer these questions, I trace the role of abjection and mourning in debates over fetal remains disposal regulations. Critiquing pro-life views of fetal personhood while challenging feminists to develop richer and more compelling accounts of fetal remains, I argue that (...) embracing the ambiguity and diversity of pregnant bodies can strengthen rather than undermine reproductive autonomy. I conceptualize reproductive autonomy relationally, contending that it entails the pregnant subject’s authority to construct as well as to interpret her lived body, including the fetus. Additionally, because the embodied self is inextricable from social context, reproductive autonomy also requires community support. To support these claims, I develop an account of pregnant bodies as ontologically multiple and advocate embracing abjection rather than suppressing it. Finally, I object to fetal remains regulations because they inscribe fetal grievability into the law. (shrink)

Nurses working in forensic psychiatric settings face unique challenges in practice, where they take on a dual role of custody and caring. Patient resistance is widespread within these restrictive settings and can take many forms. Perhaps the most disturbing form of resistance entails a patient's weaponization of their bodily fluids, with nurses as their target. The tendency in assigning motive for this act is to relegate to the psychopathology of the patient. This paper will adopt a poststructuralist perspective to reexamine (...) this phenomenon as an act of resistance through the lens of Kristeva's concept of abjection. Patients confined in these settings have little sense of control, and in resistance may resort to the only thing available: their bodily fluids. By weaponizing the abject, patients actively violate and permeate the physical and psychological boundaries of nurses—the very boundaries considered crucial to safe and professional forensic psychiatric nursing practice. By recognizing this phenomenon as an act of resistance to confinement and loss of control, nurses may reorient their approach to care in forensic psychiatric settings. (shrink)

This article reads some familiar examples of contemporary visual arts, such as Cindy Sherman, Mona Hatoum, Robert Gober, John Miller, Eva Hesse, Orlan and Robert Mapplethorpe, by engaging with diff...

This essay examines the connections between ignorance and abjection. Chanter relates Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection to the mechanisms of division found in feminist theory, race theory, film theory, and cultural theory. The neglect of the co-constitutive relationships among such categories as gender, race, and class produces abjection. If those categories are treated as separate parts of a person's identity that merely interlock or intermesh, they are rendered invisible and unknowable even in the very discourses about them. (...) Race thus becomes gender's unthought other, just as gender becomes the excluded other of race. Via an exploration of Margaret's Museum and Casablanca, the author shows why the various sexual, racial, and nationalist dynamics of the two films cannot be reduced to class or commodity fetishism, following Karl Marx, or psychoanalytic fetishism, following Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Whether they are crystallized in Marxist or Lacanian terms, fetishistic currencies of exchange are haunted by an imaginary populated by unthought, abject figures. Ejected from the systems of exchange consecrated as symbolic, fragmented, dislocated, diseased body parts inform and constitute meaning. (shrink)

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 from which the male community 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. (shrink)

The essay looks into the pedagogical role of philosophy in shaping the practice of dissent. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s radical understandings of philosophy as a machinic assemblage, it redeploys philosophy as a pedagogical tool which gathers traction from social events and remains invested in a dissensual politics. As a machinic assemblage committed to a dissensual politics philosophy works alongside collective modalities of enunciation that operate outside conventional structures of the academia. Such assemblages of enunciation often inhabit a (...) zone of critical inarticulacy brimming with the promise of new kinds of knowledge. How does philosophy critically interact with spaces of dissent along lines of gender, caste, ethnicity and nationalism to enable novel critical interventions? Deleuze and Guattari’s answer redirects us to a pragmatic engagement with philosophy which involves the manufacture of new pedagogical concepts as part of a schizoanalytic apparatus of protest. These concepts often emerge out of a visceral response to events unfolding around us. Needless to emphasize that such a philosophy which emerges out of a praxial encounter with life cannot be framed as an institutional staple, but takes shape as part of a visceral politics of the now. What then is the role of pedagogy in shaping an ethics of dissent and how can such a pedagogy mobilize plebeian acts of resistance in the sphere of the everyday? (shrink)

This essay explores the relationships between subjection, abjection, and race in Judith Butler's work. That the practices and processes of subjection are central in Butler's thinking is hardly in question. From her early work on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in Subjects of Desire (1987) through her thinking in Gender Trouble ([1990] 1999), Bodies That Matter ([1993] 2011), The Psychic Life of Power (1997), and Undoing Gender (2004d), Butler has explored the performative and psychic production of gendered subjects. In her (...) work on precarity and precariousness in texts like Precarious Life (2004c), Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), Frames of War (2009), and Dispossession (2013), she theorized how the subject is inextricably caught up in, and becomes a subject through, the very relations with others that can – at times – undo it. Indeed, the title of the collection of her essays published in 2015b, Senses of the Subject, points to how Butler's thinking has returned again and again to the question of how subjects are formed and in what senses. One of those senses of subjection that appears regularly in Butler's thought is one wherein subjects are constituted by, and work to maintain their coherence through, practices of abjection. Abjection is the splitting off and repelling of some part of the self that cannot then be acknowledged, accepted, or touched without bringing that self's constitution as subject into question. Subjection here relies on the production of an always threatening realm of a potentially destabilizing abject. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mother Earth, Mother City:Abjection and the AnthropoceneJanell WatsonIf the term “Anthropocene” designates the global influence of the human species over its terrestrial habitat, then its arrival profoundly changes a number of relations that have long occupied Western philosophy: that between humans and animals; between humans and nature; and between humans and their technologies. The possibility that humans have transformed not only the biology but also the geology of (...) the earth brings to the forefront the physical world, whose corporeal materiality was all but ignored by mid-twentieth-century continental philosophy, focused almost exclusively on language and politics. As Michel Serres put it in 1990, “Our a-cosmic philosophies, for almost half a century now, have been holding forth only on language or politics, writing or logic” (1995b, 29). Technicians and scientists have created a new world, observes Serres, while philosophers act as if they still live in the old one (2001, 4). By the time Paul Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer formally introduced the term “Anthropocene” in 2000 (Crutzen and Steffen, 2003), Serres had developed a philosophy for the new human-dominated techno-scientific world. It is true that the physical world has in the meanwhile reappeared in continental philosophy thanks to object-oriented philosophy and various new materialisms, but Serres was among the first to formulate into a philosophical question the human impact on the physical and biological earth (2014, 63). He may well have been the very first to develop a philosophy of pollution. Serres complains that Plato, one of the few Western philosophers to even mention detritus, excludes residue and waste from metaphysics (2001, 185). Garbage, atmospheric emissions, and toxic waste not [End Page 269] only threaten life, but are also transforming biological and geological features of the earth. The philosophical dimension of pollution will be the topic of my paper.Philosophy has remained silent on this question of waste, with the notable exception of Julia Kristeva, whose theory of abjection brought the body and its discharges back into philosophy at the height of the linguistic turn. Although she presents abjection as a psychic formation, she derives the notion from the physical reaction of repugnance, vomiting, retching, and turning away when confronted with “filth, waste, or dung” and “defilement, sewage, and muck” (1982, 2). Both Serres and Kristeva portray pollution and abjection as remainders left behind by a subject-object dialectic that positions (male) humans as subjects, and everything else (and everyone) as objects to be mastered and appropriated. They both locate this oozing dialectic in Plato’s semiotic khôra, the mother’s womb. Read together, these philosophers of pollution expose the “materialist foundation” of “dialectical logic” by way of the maternal body (Kristeva 1984, 15). Kristeva focuses on the mother in order to demonstrate a corporeal basis for language and subjectivity. Although he shares the view that language comes from the body, Serres celebrates the womb as the first human habitat. He emphasizes the maternal functions of the earth: neonatal incubator, nurturer, habitat.However, waxing poetic about the sea, the riverside, and the wilderness, Serres writes very little about cities, even though they are the preferred human habitat of the new epoch. I therefore extend his reflections on human habitation in the Anthropocene epoch by considering the maternal aspects of the global megalopolis, which simultaneously sustains domestic life and produces deadly pollution. The maternal functions of reproduction, nourishment, and shelter are pushing the limits of the earth’s physical capacities. Maternity thus lies at the heart of the problem of the Anthropocene: the possibility that human domination of the earth will deplete its ability to sustain life.MatrixAlthough he grounds his philosophy in complexity, chaos, narrative, and anthropology, in his 1990 manifesto, The Natural Contract, Serres argues that science and technology have brought about a subject-object reversal between the human species and the earth (1995b). He bases his argument on a dialectical model in order to expose a struggle for domination, the classical confrontation between master and slave. Serres credits Descartes with foreseeing from his vantage point at the dawn of the scientific age that humans would go on to “dominate and appropriate” the natural world according... (shrink)

While social research has documented the prevalence and ill effects of hepatitis C related stigma, there has been little analysis of the ways in which this stigma is constituted. This article addresses this gap in the literature by providing a phenomenologically informed account of the ways in which societal attitudes and regulations draw from and feed back into corporeal processes and experiences of embodiment in the creation of hepatitis C related stigma. The case is made that three components are central (...) to hepatitis C stigma: associations with illicit drug injecting, infectiousness and societal aversion to chronic illness. The article draws upon qualitative interviews with 40 people living with chronic hepatitis C in New Zealand and Australia, as well as the researcher’s embodied experience of living with the virus. The works of Julia Kristeva and Mary Douglas are utilized to provide an analysis that moves beyond acknowledgement of societal reinforcers of stigma, such as prohibitory drug laws, to address underlying notions of boundary crossing in the production of stigma and exclusionary practices. (shrink)

Regulators of G protein signaling (RGS) proteins provide timely termination of G protein‐coupled receptor (GPCR) responses. Serving as a central control point in GPCR signaling cascades, RGS proteins are promising targets for drug development. In this review, we discuss the involvement of RGS proteins in the pathophysiology of the gastrointestinal inflammation and their potential to become a target for anti‐inflammatory drugs. Specifically, we evaluate the emerging evidence for modulation of selected receptor families: opioid, cannabinoid and serotonin by RGS proteins. We (...) discuss how the regulation of RGS protein level and activity may modulate immunological pathways involved in the development of intestinal inflammation. Finally, we propose that RGS proteins may serve as a prognostic factor for survival rate in colorectal cancer. The ideas introduced in this review set a novel conceptual framework for the utilization of RGS proteins in the treatment of gastrointestinal inflammation, a growing major concern worldwide. (shrink)

This article engages with medical practice to develop a philosophically informed understanding of epistemic engagement in medicine, and epistemic object relations more broadly. I take my point of departure in the clinical encounter and draw on French psychoanalytical theory to develop and expand a taxonomy already proposed by Karin Knorr-Cetina. In so doing, I argue for the addition of an abject-type object relation; that is, the encounter with objects that transgress frameworks and disrupt further investigation, hence preventing dynamic engagement and (...) negatively shaping our epistemic pathways. This article is primarily theoretical, although partly grounded in qualitative fieldwork. (shrink)

Research into human trafficking for sexual exploitation often conceptualizes the experience through the lens of migration and/or sex work. Women’s bodies are often politicized and the corporeal experiences of trafficking are neglected. The gendered stigma attached to women who have been trafficked for sexual exploitation is clearly evident across cultures and requires further analysis as part of wider societal responses to sexual violence. Through the analysis of letters written by women who have been trafficked and sexually exploited from post-Soviet countries (...) to Israel, this article argues that conceptualizing women’s bodies as bounded spaces allows an investigation of the transgression of those boundaries and opens up a thought-provoking framework for theorizing experiences of, and social responses to, sexual violence, stigma and social exclusion. It explores themes of pollution and dirt as ways to communicate social exclusion through references to boundaries crossed and spaces rendered abject. Women’s narratives of trafficking are examined utilizing the theory of abjection, and the embodied effects of sexual violence and body boundary transgression are elucidated. This analysis shows that the women in this study articulate an embodied narrative of trafficking that is experienced in relation to body boundaries and expressed through motifs of dirt, smell, disgust and pollution. (shrink)

A considerable amount of academic attention has been paid to John Kennedy and to his group of advisors during the Cuban missile crisis. Next to no attention has been accorded other bodies of the Kennedy White House that had daily access to a President's most private moments and possibly to his important deliberations. Drawing on Richard Reeves' account of President Kennedy: Profile of Power, I revisit the early 1960s looking for bodies of power that are culturally sexed female by others (...) and compelled into being as workaday secretaries and confidants, and para-Everythings for Kennedy. In doing so, I draw on the feminist body theorizing of Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz, as well as the evocations of bodies in important but abjected places featured in Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale. After constructing the historically broad category of the handmaid to Washington power, I reread constructions of decision-making in the Cuban missile crisis offered by Graham Allison and conclude that the feint of mancentred Washington masks bodies given the locations, skills and resources to ooze into spaces of decision and power canonically forbidden to them. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hyper-Abjects:Finitude, “Sustainability,” and the Maternal Body in the AnthropoceneBethany DoaneThe concept of the Anthropocene prioritizes a new paradigmatic scale that seems to outweigh that of “the political”: imagining deep time or the death of the human species as a result of climate change tends to negate the (relatively speaking) smaller-scale concerns of race, class, gender, or capitalism. While feminist critique is often circumscribed by this political scale, and thus (...) may seem to be dwarfed or rendered obsolete by the geological, deep-time scale of the Anthropocene, examining issues of feminist concern from this geological perspective has profound implications for thinking not only of gender politics but also of how to construct something like the political at all in this new era. Suggesting a new and normative global politics is, of course, beyond the scope of this article, but perhaps we might begin to conceive of a political schema that would function more appropriately in light of this grander scale. At the very least we may begin to think the borders or limits of the species as it has existed in the modern era in a way that neither environmentalism nor posthumanism has yet been able to sufficiently tackle.The Anthropocene marks the epoch in which human activities have caused global environmental changes that will leave their mark in the geological strata of the earth itself.1 While the specific moments of its onset are contested, its beginnings are generally associated with the industrial age; Crutzen and Stoermer mark its onset at roughly 1800 with the beginnings [End Page 251] of the industrial revolution. (Timothy Morton pinpoints it more specifically with the invention of the steam engine in 1794.) The changes made in this era of geological, technological, and climate convergence have accelerated in the last seventy years or so in what scientists call the Great Acceleration, which began around 1940 and quickened anthropogenic impact with events like the testing/dropping of atomic bombs, the homogenization of biodiversity, mass extinctions as a result of human activity, and various types of drilling and mining.2 In the era broadly conceived as modernity, the steady march of “progress” that has so shaped the paradigm of the period has been made possible only through its own abjections: those phenomena that mark the era as limited, limiting, and unsustainable. In other words, the “birth of the modern world” was made possible only through devastating acts of violence: institutionalized inequalities like slavery, oppression, colonization, and war. These acts of violence translate as cannibalization at the global scale: the exploitation of most members of the species and the consumption of their resources for the benefit and luxury of the few. While these forms of violence have been criticized and confronted by political and theoretical movements since at least the middle of the twentieth century, thinking of them in terms of the Anthropocene and deep time allows us to consider their consequences in a new light. Our present awareness of the Anthropocene makes visible phenomena like climate, global warming, earth, and the “anthropos” that present us with the very real eventuality of species finitude. Species finitude calls into question not just the practices of modernity that have brought about the Anthropocene (the exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few), but the entire paradigm of global thinking that is invested in progress, growth, and even in any environmentalism that calls for stewardship of the earth. The notion of care for an entity like “nature” or “the environment” only reinforces the separation between the human and its milieu, a separation that is impossible to maintain in light of the absolute inextricability that the Anthropocene brings to light.At the heart of this essay are two theoretical concepts: Julia Kristeva’s abjection, and Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects, both of which stand for a sort of insufficiency or impossibility of discourse (politics, the Symbolic, etc.) in managing some Real object or phenomenon. Kristeva’s abject is generally thought of as functioning at two levels or scales: the personal, in which an individual must cast off the abject of the maternal body in order to become a proper subject; and the social or... (shrink)

Neglected tropical diseases are defined operationally as diseases that prevail in “tropical” regions and are under‐researched, under‐funded, and under‐treated compared with their disease burden. By analysing the adjectives “tropical” and “neglected,” I expose and interrogate the discourses within which the term “neglected tropical disease” derives its meaning. First, I argue that the term “tropical” conjures the notion of “tropicality,” a form of Othering which erroneously explains the disease‐prevalence of “tropical” regions by reference to environmental determinism, rather than colonialism and neocolonialism. (...) Second, I examine the way in which this Othering enables the abjection of tropical regions and their peoples, leading to neglect. I recommend that the term “neglected tropical diseases” be more carefully contextualised within health scholarship, education, and policy. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on the term ‘immanence’ in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and show how it relates to her historical account of sexual oppression. I argue that Beauvoir's use of Hegel's master−slave dialectic and of Claude Lévi-Strauss's reflection on the prohibition of incest lead her to claim that in all societies “woman” is constructed as “absolutely other.” I show that there is an ambiguous logic of abjection at work in Beauvoir's account that explains why men (...) are the only examples of transcendence in history, whereas women lack it. Finally, I discuss the way in which the relation between immanence and abjection helps to explain the intellectual relation between Georges Bataille and Beauvoir. (shrink)

Abstract:Nicholas Winding Refn regularly appears to offer men as his audience's main point of identification. Yet these men are predominantly transgressive characters who frequently, if not constantly, frustrate spectator-identification and consequently linger on the periphery of cinematic paradigms. In three stages, this article analyses how Refn's violent male characters affect spectatorship. First, it considers the unstable subject mechanisms for spectator-identification afforded by classical Hollywood cinema. Second, it examines Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytical theorization of the abject and outlines the relevance of her (...) concepts to Refn's narratives. Third, it conducts a close textual analysis of Bronson (2008) and Drive (2011), arguing that the disregard for symbolic order demonstrated by Refn's male protagonists and their concomitant embrace of the death drive inhibit spectator-identification. This analysis ultimately aims to demonstrate the import of Kristeva's theories to a more comprehensive understanding of the abject's complex relationship to Refn's œuvre and to spectator-identification in cinema. (shrink)

The World Health Organization, in its last review of its International Classification of Diseases, established a new classification for chronic pain. Among the principal categories, of particular interest is chronic primary pain as a new type of diagnosis in those cases in which the etiology of the disease is not clear, being termed as chronic primary visceral pain when it is situated in the thorax, abdomen, or pelvis. Due to the novelty of the term, the objective of the systematic review (...) was to examine the psychopathological and neuropsychological disorders associated with chronic primary visceral pain. We carried out a search of the scientific literature following the PRISMA directives using the Pubmed, Medline, PsycInfo and Scopus databases. A total of 33 articles were selected after applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The analysis of the studies showed that most persons with chronic primary visceral pain suffer from at least one psychological disorder; the most prevalent being anxiety, depressive or somatoform disorders. The most frequent psychopathological symptoms are anxiety, depression and somatization. Similarly, the findings are insufficient to determine the existence of deficits in the domains of executive functioning, memory and intelligence. However, the existence of attention biases does seem to be clear. This review supposes a starting point for conceptualizing chronic primary visceral pain. It is necessary to continue further research so as to obtain a better understanding of this pathology and the disorders associated. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Antigone and AbjectionThe Ethics and Politics of RestlessnessRachel JonesOne can trace, throughout Sarah Kofman’s body of work, a thread of continuity, a question about the unsayable, an enigma, a caesura, a riddle, a disruption, an aporia, the impossibility of saying that which nonetheless, according to an ethical exigency, demands to be said.—Tina Chanter, “Playing with Fire: Kofman and Freud on Being Feminine, Jewish and Homosexual”These are the opening lines (...) of Tina Chanter’s essay on Sarah Kofman. To some extent, they could also be applied to Chanter’s own considerable body of work. Here, too, there is a thread of continuity that concerns “a question of the unsayable” and the ethical exigency of attending to that question. At the same time, these lines do not quite apply to Chanter’s own work, in ways that illuminate the distinctiveness of her approach and her contribution to contemporary philosophical thinking. For if her work foregrounds [End Page 129] the necessity with which representation depends on a constitutive relation to the unrepresentable, it also insists on the contingency of what and who are made unrepresentable, on “the unstable content of excluded yet constitutive others” (Chanter 2011, 58; hereafter, WA). If the question of the unsayable concerns the impossibility of saying that which nonetheless demands to be said, Chanter’s work shows that what it is impossible to say is always made so by a particular order of representation. Thus, part of what demands to be said is this: That what is unethical is not simply failing to attend to the unsayable, but failing to attend to the ways in which that which is unsayable and unrepresentable within a particular order of representation becomes conflated with the unsayable and unrepresentable as such, and thus condemned, like Antigone, to a living death.Chanter’s work parses the unrepresentable, while carefully avoiding two potential risks of critiquing the logic of representation. The first such risk is that of homogenizing all that is “other” to the subject within a single figure of excess: the unrepresentable or the unsayable. The second is of exposing the logic that identifies one specific mode of being as other—say, for example, the feminine—while not only failing to interrogate the production of other “others”—say, racialized others—but remaining implicitly dependent on their continued exclusion. In response, Chanter’s work patiently exposes the ways in which an exclusionary logic tends to silently reinstate itself in the very theories that seek to contest the logic of exclusion. This is not because we have not yet found the right solution, the ideal counter-theory to avoid once and for all the oppressive effects of the logic of the same. Rather, the logic of exclusion reasserts itself precisely to the extent that we continue to invest in finding a conceptual or theoretical resting place, rather than being willing to remain in the double bind of attesting to hitherto oppressed and marginalized differences, while asking which differences are occluded, silenced, or marginalized by our own attestations, by the contingent but unavoidably specific forms that such attestations take. Rather than appealing to either the unrepresentable as such, or to a privileged register of difference, Chanter asks us instead to take up the restless project of exposing the different logics of othering on which different subjects and orders of representation depend, and by which different—contingent yet constitutive—others are produced.In what follows, I trace a line across several of Chanter’s key texts to explore the ways in which what I am calling an ethics of restlessness unfolds in her work. In so doing, I risk falling into the very trap that Chanter persistently exposes, for by tracing this particular trajectory, I inevitably occlude many other valuable insights she has to offer. Nonetheless, I am going to take this risk and commit—for now—to this reading, to try to articulate what it is that I have most learned from engaging with her work, knowing that our very [End Page 130] exchange is likely to transform my understanding of and relation to that work, generating different interpretative commitments in the future.Ethics and Alterity... (shrink)

When The Age renamed the corner of Russell and Bourke streets the ‘Golden Elbow’ it brought the city into close proximity with an altogether different city. Neither Chang Mai, Hong Kong nor Melbourne, the Golden Elbow was defined by what it could be. Neither one thing nor another, the Golden Elbow is a space of the city-becoming-other. Through narrative work and news media maps of no-go zones, machines mobilise fear and thus value, from the desire flowing through this abject zone. (...) Capitalism sucks value from these encounters through the production of fear as affect. The city-becoming-other is both enormously productive, and destructive of bodies caught up in the mix. This article explores the flow of desire and the abject of a city becoming other through a street drug marketplace. The encounter with the abject brings use closer to the beauty and fear of ontological mixity. (shrink)

This paper examines cancer through the lens of abjection. While cancer can be understood as an abject lifeform, we explore what we name the abject ontologies created through both cancer detection technologies/practices and cancer treatment, specifically the drug combination Adriamycin and Cytoxan. We ask: what are the abject ontologies produced through living with and living on from cancer diagnosis and treatment? Our concern is to map how cancer undoes our supposedly stable categories inherited from modernist logic, challenges our very (...) ideas of what it means to be human, and demands an ethical reorientation of public cancer discourse. (shrink)

Nationalism can be closely associated with powerful feelings about the relationship among cultural heritage, identity and embodied experience. Almost by definition this relationship is expressed in terms of continuity, distinctiveness and the purity of tradition, to an extent that nationalistic sentiments can be said to be ‘visceral.’ Contrasting the way in which the body is implicated in nature cure and Ayurveda, two forms of medicine closely linked to nationalism in India, this article presents an analytical perspective on the embodiment of (...) viscerality to provide a more nuanced understanding of how these experiences blur distinctions of cultural continuity and how an ecology of the body shapes the cultural politics of tradition in India. (shrink)

My commentary on mcmahon addresses the fact that only peripheral data have been considered for explaining differential sensibility in somato- and viscerosensory systems. This fails to take it into account that central processing for visceral and somatic inputs is now known to depend on different functional pathways. My commentary on berkley points out that the hypothalamus-pituitary axis is more responsive to stress in females than in males.

In this article, I examine the marginalisation and abjection of strongwilled and assertive women in Dagaaba settings in rural north-western Ghana. This is done by paying attention to a local identity category known as pog gandao—‘a woman who is more than a man’. The pog gandao, or what I gloss as the wilful woman, concept is used by men and women locally to stigmatise hard-working and assertive Dagaaba women. Drawing inspiration from the reappropriation and redeployment of queer abjection (...) for the subversion of homophobia and the violence of compulsory heterosexuality, I demonstrate how such naming or shaming into the position of a pog gandao serves to hamper initiatives by enterprising and talented Dagaaba women. Being labelled as pog gandao, it appears, is even to lose one’s status in normative gender presentation as a woman; it means to transcend into a realm beyond the masculine. But this transcendence is not enviable due to its potential to expose the subject in question to perceived supernatural harm, a serious matter in this cultural context whereby the world of human affairs is understood as thoroughly saturated with supernatural forces that structure daily and ritual comportment. I argue that the shaming interpellation of pog gandao works as the most powerful weapon against wilful women in oppressive male-centric institutions of the Dagaaba. And yet, this stigmatised interpellation also has great emancipating potential, and I conclude by exploring ways to reclaim it for undermining female subordination, and for both empowering women and for feminist politics. (shrink)

The moral sentiments adumbrated by Adam Smith and Charles Darwin reflect some of our basic social appraisals of each other. One set of moral appraisals reflects disgust and withdrawal, a form of contempt. Another set of moral appraisals reflects active concern responses, an appreciation of the experiences (sympathy for some- one)of other individuals and approach related behaviors. While no one set of neural structures is designed for only moral appraisals, a diverse set of neural regions that include the gustatory/visceral neural (...) axis, basal ganglia and iverse neocortical sites underlie moral judgment. (shrink)

Media representations of illnesses, particularly those associated with stigma such as non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI), not only define health conditions for mass audiences, but generally do so in ways that are consistent with dominant ideologies. This article examines the construction of non-suicidal self-injury as practiced by female adolescents and young adults in four US films: Girl, Interrupted, Painful Secrets, Prozac Nation, and Thirteen. The methodology used to examine the films’ narrative structure is Kenneth Burke’s dramatism, while Julia Kristeva’s concept of (...) class='Hi'>abjection informs the analysis. On one hand, a paradigmatic reading suggests that the films frame self-injury as resistance to repressive maternal domination of female adolescents. On the other hand, syntagmatic analysis reveals a privileged response to NSSI in the form of pacification administered by psychotherapists functioning as the return of the phallic-mother fantasy. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 5, August 2019, Page 553-562.

The Picture of Abjection is an analysis of independent, contemporary, international film. Appropriating Kristeva's analysis of abjection, which she developed in the context of psychoanalytic theory to designate that which a subject rejects as a site of impurity, the book takes up the abject in order to illuminate various intersections of discrimination. The focus is on how race, gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity and nationality intersect with one another in ways that involve abjection. The argument is informed by (...) a variety of disciplines, including film theory, psychoanalysis, philosophy and gender theory. The aim of the book is to enhance understanding of how film can both engage in and ameliorate the ways forms of discrimination play off one another. (shrink)

This edited volume traces cultural appearances of disgust and investigates the varied forms and functions disgust takes and is given in both established and vernacular cultural practises. Contributors focus on the socio-cultural creation, consumption, reception and experiencing of disgust, a visceral emotion whose cultural situatedness and circulation has historically been overlooked in academic scholarship. Chapters challenge and supplement the biological understanding of disgust as a danger reaction and as a base emotion evoked by the lower senses, touch, taste and smell, (...) through a wealth of original case studies in which disgust is analyzed in its aesthetic qualities, and in its cultural and artistic appearances and uses, featuring visual and aural media. Because it is interdisciplinary, the book will be of interest to scholars in a wide range of fields, including visual studies, philosophy, aesthetics, sociology, history, literature, and musicology. (shrink)

This article argues that Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection lays out a theory that is not universal in its application, but rather details the violent emergence and defence of Eurocentric, colonial and orientalist subjectivities and related hierarchical social orders. The Eurocentrism found in Kristeva’s political and theoretical stances are referenced, with detailed attention paid to explicating how her theory of abjection describes a brutal, colonising, psychological and social mechanism. This framework is applied to transphobia (...) and its manifestations. It is centrally argued that gender diversity, trans rights and trans inclusivity may be the targets of multiple and compounding abjection processes. The essay concludes with looking at how young trans people are starting to refuse transphobic abjection to survive, to thrive and to revitalise gender diversity. (shrink)

There are some conspicuous differences between the sensibilities of cutaneous and visceral tissues: (1) Direct trauma, which readily produces pain when applied to the skin, is mostly without effect in healthy visceral tissue. (2) Pain that arises from visceral tissues is initially often poorly localised and diffuse. (3) With time, visceral pains are often referred to more superficial structures. (4) The site of referred pain may also show hyperalgesia. (5) In disease states, the afflicted viscera may also become hyperalgesic. In (...) this target article, I consider to what extent differences in the physiology, anatomy, and chemistry of peripheral processing systems explain these different sensibilities. In almost every aspect, there are subtle differences in the properties of the processing mechanisms for cutaneous and visceral information. These may arise because of distinct developmental cues operating in the two domains. Many of the differences between visceral and cutaneous afferents are quantitative rather than qualitative. The quantitative differences, for example in the density of afferent innervation, can be large. The quantitative differences in the numbers of afferents alone may be a sufficient explanation for some aspects of the differential sensibility, for example, the poor localisation of sensation and the apparent insensitivity to focal yet tissue- damaging stimuli. In addition, the few clear qualitative differences apparent in the innervations of the two tissue types may be of special importance. That the encoding of visceral nociceptive events may occur by an intensity mechanism rather than a specificity mechanism could be the key difference in viscerosensory and somatosensory processing. (shrink)

The 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs tracks the fictional pursuit of an American serial killer by a Federal Bureau of Investigation trainee, via the assistance of another incarcerated serial killer. It features psychologically disturbing themes, such as corpses, the mutilation of skin and monstrous persons. Incidentally, these are all themes regularly encountered by nurses in their day‐to‐day practices, including forensic mental health nurses. Despite regular encounters with these themes and phenomena, nurses continue to find them disturbing and troubling, (...) but, at the same time, clinically fascinating. This paper will mobilize Kristeva's poststructuralist, psychoanalytic concept of abjection to relate the encounters in The Silence of the Lambs to those of nurses, to reconceptualize feelings of both disgust and fascination and to consider how vulnerability may benefit nursing practice. Of particular relevance are the breakdown of skin encountered in nursing practice, encounters with corpses and work with forensic patients considered monstrous. The film provides opportunity for nurses to conceptualize abjection in their own practice and to consider how a reconceptualization of boundaries and vulnerability may prove productive. (shrink)

Two years before the opening of the Paralympic Games in London in 2012, the British TV network Channel 4 launched a campaign called Freaks of Nature. As part of the campaign they produced the short film Meet the Superhumans by director Tom Tagholm. The film became an immediate success, but was also criticised for portraying the Paralympians as ‘freaks’ and for reducing the Paralympics to a ‘freak show’. But was it wrong to describe the Paralympics as a ‘freak show’? Is (...) there even a point of using the term ‘freak show’ in relation to sports? There might be, and that is what I am discussing in this paper. To be more specific, I am proposing that the term ‘freak show’ can challenge and destabilise common aesthetic views in sport, simply by the adding of abject dimensions to the athletic performances. From this one can claim that the Paralympics reconnects to the freak show-tradition of the past. And that, in itself, can have a moral and political impact. (shrink)