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Abby, Patrick, and Dan discuss and apply Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection. It’s an influential and powerful idea in its own right, but it also generates clarifying insights into our present cultural and political moment. To get there, the three first do some necessary ground-clearing on reading Kristeva’s notoriously complex style, the broader status of language in French poststructuralist thought, and the etymology and connotations of “abjection” and the “abject” themselves. As they discuss, abjection does more than describe an object or a state of being – it also describes a set of experiences, a fundamentally embodied suite of affects, and, above all, an ongoing set of processes that simultaneously consolidate and threaten our most taken-for-granted ideas about subjectivity, the body, other people, and political life. From trans bathroom panics to misogyny to abortion to immigration to Alligator Alcatraz and beyond, the three show how the work of abjection runs through a panoply of reactionary programs; how the continual creation of abjected, “revolting” populations and the conjuring of feelings of revulsion against them works to subvert revolutionary possibilities; and how abject groups have sought to both name and resist their oppression and to reclaim and redeploy its terms.

References include: 

Julia Kristeva, “Approaching Abjection” in Powers of Horror

Noëlle McAfee, Fear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis

Ryan Thorneycroft, Reimagining Disablist and Ableist Violence as Abjection

Eyo Awara. The Psychic Life of Horror: Abjection and Racialization in Butler’s Thought

Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination

Kelly Oliver, Reading Kristeva: Unravelling the Double Bind.

Mark Miller. Cast Down: Abjection in America, 1700-1850

Imogen Tyler, Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain

Calvin Thomas, Masculinity, Psychoanalysis, Straight Queer Theory: Essays on Abjection in Literature, Mass Culture, and Film

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