New Avenues for the Politics of the Abject

Abstract

Alberto Sandoval-Sinchez openly, creatively, and, in what I see as a and way, explains in his paper his fascination with abject body because, as he tells us, he has to. His writing, he says, is his way of keeping alive and of negotiating a body that houses I use words like kind and generous to describe what he's decided to present in such a dynamic and remarkably articulate way to a room of relative strangers because, unfortunately, I think that I can safely assume that loss of friends and loved ones to AIDS is something many of us here have learned to live with, to negotiate, and to try to explain to ourselves in an ongoing process of mourning. So I want to thank him for his work here, which proposes new ways of doing this. The body is foundation of this theoretical project; and writing, as a critical cultural practice, facilitates a politics of survival immersed in what Sandoval-Stinchez calls the deep and troubled muddy waters of abjection, with possibility of writing as a lifeline or umbilical cord to But what we've experienced here today is not just presentation of a theory or a politics of survival through abjection but an example of abjection as a performative act in disruption of typically dry academic conference or symposium paper, with inclusion of autobiographical information and a short performance in Spanglish, a language that always seems to remind me that identity is constantly in process of being made. Judith Butler has been instrumental in transformation of North American queer theory into a viable critical and theoretical position. At same time, she has expressed some reservations about potentially essentialist politics of this approach. She's emphasized importance of queer position as what she calls a specific reworking of abjection. In Bodies That Matter, she points out that