Abject Body Research Articles

The Becoming of the Abject Body in Las Malas by Camila Sosa Villada

Introduction: The article analyzed Las malas (2019), a novel by Camila Sosa Villada, highlighting its significance as both a testimony and a denunciation of the violence inflicted on transvestites. It explored how the novel shed light on the social exclusion and rejection of these bodies, considered abject according to the theories of Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler.Development: The article addressed the representation of the transvestite body as both an object of repulsion and desire, revealing the hypocrisy of hegemonic masculinity. It also explained how society’s disciplinary power, as described by Michel Foucault, manifested in the discrimination, abandonment, and violence against the novel’s protagonists. Additionally, it highlighted the role of Aunt Encarna as a protective figure within a transvestite community that found refuge in collectivity. The analysis included the imposed clandestinity on transvestites, who could only inhabit the night to avoid daytime hostility. Furthermore, it discussed the duality of identity in characters like Las Cuervas, who experienced femininity in secrecy without suffering social rejection.Conclusion: The article concluded that Las malas redefined the Latin American literary canon by giving voice to an identity historically marginalized. Through Sosa Villada’s autobiographical narration, the novel recognized the importance of dissident identities and their place in literature.

Transgredir el modelo hegemónico de la masculinidad en la poesía. De Luis Cernuda a Ángelo Néstore

This paper analyzes the representations of new masculinities and dissident identities in poetic texts written in Spanish in the 20th and 21st centuries, from Luis Cernuda to Ángelo Néstore, including Porfirio Barba-Jacob, Federico García Lorca, Leopoldo M.ª Panero and Ana Rossetti as representative authors of what has come to be considered queer literature. In this current, issues about the construction of the subject, corporeality, sex, categories and cultural institutions of the patriarchal and binary system are recognized and problematized. To this end, this study employs the methodological synergy of queer studies with literary criticism in order to expose and evaluate the literary manifestations of abject bodies in the Hispanic context.

Remaining in the Thraldoms: Re-Reading Transvestism and the Abject Body in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion

Remaining in the Thraldoms: Re-Reading Transvestism and the Abject Body in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion

Whose city? (De)colonising the bodies of speculative fiction in Lauren Beukes's Zoo City

This article explores the (de)colonisation of the body and body boundaries in contemporary South African speculative fiction, paying particular attention to award-wining author, Lauren Beukes's, second novel, Zoo City (2010). I will apply Lara Cox's (2018:317) argument that 'Haraway's cyborg resembles the liminal view of identity presented by queer theory, which seeks to blur strict divisions between sexual and gender categories, dissolving binary oppositions such as woman/man and heterosexual/homosexual', to my reading of Zoo City. By centring the novel around Zinzi December, a resident of 'Zoo City' (the marginalised underbelly of Johannesburg), and situating the novel in the cradle of humankind, Beukes reacts against South Africa's colonial history and its colonisation of the body by blurring the animal-human boundary and challenging the colonial construct of body binaries. The novel can be read as a decolonial feminist text as it re-writes South Africa's apartheid history and critiques its division, separation and bodily segregation. Furthermore, I explore how fictional bodies are imagined and constructed in the text; I ask what kinds of boundary-breaking bodies predominate; and consider their thematic, narrative, and political significance in the postapartheid imaginary in relation to speculative fiction. I examine how new boundaries (particularly between 'normative' society and 'Zoo City') are formulated. Zoo City pulls into focus Kristeva's (1982) notion of the abject body as a central to its concerns, while also bringing attention to Foucault's (1992) notion of the 'disciplined' body. It foregrounds questions about the formulation and destabilisation of identity, with a particular focus on the construction of female identity. This article builds on the critical literature on the dystopian post-apartheid state by examining Zoo City's depictions of marginalised people and its construction of the body and body boundaries, as well as by extending the examination of representations of the body in speculative fiction.

Introduction: Poetry and extremity

In thinking about the relationship between poetry and the extreme, we wanted to examine how poetry functions in a number of ways: how it creates the space – and new forms of language – to articulate events which seem inexpressible; how poets innovate to enact resistance; how poetry helps to break silences and taboos; and how poetry, and the role of the poets, is so often linked to the transgression of boundaries. The submissions we received embraced the notion of extremity in a variety of ways, considering the mathematical complexities of the work of Louis Zukofsky, for instance, and the desire for liberation in the poetry of Alejandra Pizarnik, whose life, Caio Yurgel writes, might be understood as “a long preparation for suicide”. We received work on provocative ideas about nationalism and resistance, politics and disaster, about collaboration through the extremities of climate change and COVID, and how women poets might “disrupt and disturb” patriarchal systems to construct new visions of autobiographical memory, as Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton examine. The poetic responses also echo these themes, often eerily, focussing on abject bodies and the taboo, on autobiographical memories, on places overwhelmed by the devastations of extreme weather events, and on the “phenomena of perception” as a reaction to the alienating nature of pandemic ‘normal’. Importantly, the responses, both scholarly and creative, demonstrate the centrality of poetry to the difficult, wrestling with questions about selfhood and belonging, for example, as well as with language itself, its contortions and transformations in seeking to find new shapes for the ineffable.

Abject Body of History

Abject Body of History

Disgusting desire: The Windup Girl as both object of desire and abject body

The primary question this article deals with is one of ontology. In a dystopian world populated with genetically engineered windups and hybrids, what constitutes ‘the human’? This article looks at how the posthuman body in a dystopian novel like The Windup Girl, set in a world where geographical, political, social, economic and religious norms and boundaries are erased and reconfigured, can in no way simply remain a mere body, but transmutes into a highly complex political and social site from whence multiple relations of power originate, travel and culminate in. The titular character in the novel, Emiko, is a genetically engineered windup created in a laboratory, with obedience and the need to please etched right into her DNA. This makes her a prized possession for a brothel owner in Bangkok, once her Japanese master abandons her. She is both desirable and revolting to her customers at the same time – her perfect body is too perfect, her genetic urge to please at any cost draws them in, but her involuntary shaking and robot-like jerking disgusts them. The windup can thus be seen as both the Lacanian object cause of desire and Kristeva’s abject body.

Ryan S. Schellenberg. Abject Joy: Paul, Prison, and the Art of Making Do

Ryan S. Schellenberg. <i>Abject Joy: Paul, Prison, and the Art of Making Do</i>

Sexist academic socialization and feminist resistance: (de)constructing women’s (dis)placement in Brazilian accounting academia

In this paper, we analyze women’s experiences in the Brazilian accounting academia to understand how entrenched sexism shapes their socialization process. We argue that the doctoral programs's socialization is based on rooted sexism that reinforces and maintains the construction of scarcity of women in accounting academia. Theoretically, we draw upon the discussion of sexism and academic socialization processes. Methodologically, we conducted 19 interviews with 17 women, both pursuing their Ph.D. or already working as faculties. Our evidence points to three main findings: (i) women are constantly being expelled from accounting academia and receiving constant reminders that they are an abject body in a masculine/masculiniized environment; (ii) this expulsion attempt is embodied especially during motherhood – that constitutes an embodied process of othering – and by objectification, navigating both silence and sexualization; and (iii) they resist by relying upon have values opposed to the pale male me(n)ritocratic ideal. We conclude that the “old boys’ club” pillars are being challenged as women subvert the established sexist values. This paper has a twofold contribution: (i) presenting the anatomy of how sexism takes form in the socialization process and questioning the taken-for-granted doctoral program’s rules while presenting a new possibility of academic values, and; (ii) adding Brazilian voices to the diversity and inclusion accounting literature.

The Tiger (in)Flu(ence): Posthuman, Abject Bodies, ‘Speculated’ Femininities and Diasporic Subjectivities

Written by Larissa Lai, a Chinese-Canadian writer who has always alchemized her production with Chinese mythology, The Tiger Flu (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018) is a polyphonic novel because of the plurality of interpretative acts it evokes, and because of its interweaving of different literary frames and genres. In the first part of this essay, I analyse how Lai exploits this complex intertwining of genres to address a sense of diasporic belonging. In the second part, I explore how this approach leads to moving beyond normative and totalizing definitions. Lai sets up a multifaceted feminine space where issues about the rethinking of the category of woman, sisterhood and a broader conception of the community can be raised. I argue that Lai’s representation of non-normative female bodies becomes functional in revealing how abject bodies can challenge the hegemonic meaning of gender and identity. In a critical reading that cannot be divorced from a (trans-)Canadian context, I conclude by exploring how Lai guides her readers on an intimate journey across increasingly fluid borders and an unsolved (and unsolvable) vision of the future.

Silenced Tongues, Speaking Bodies: The Representation of Postcolonial Bodies in Incarceration in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s This Blinding Absence of Light

This paper examines the representation of postcolonial bodies in incarceration in postcolonial Morocco in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s This Blinding Absence of Light. This representation is explored in light of two different literary theories and concepts: Julia Kristeva’s “abject bodies”, and Arthur Frank’s “disciplined bodies”. The first concept “abject bodies” mirrors the postcolonial oppressive regime’s desired representation of the political detainees’ bodies as raw and primitive, loathsome and excluded, and dehumanized and desexualized. Such degrading representation triggers feelings of humiliation, estrangement, denial, and alienation on the part of the prisoners, creating an identity crisis and a self and other dilemma. However, the second concept “disciplined bodies” serves as a tool of resistance, since the prisoners introduce a counter-representation of their bodies that defies the one prescribed and depicted by the state. By practicing self- control and regimentation over their bodies, the prisoners are able to reach a state of spiritual transcendence through their permeable bodies, a state that helps them escape their corporeal reality of suffering and abjection into the sublime ethereal realms of meditation, emancipation, renewal, inspiration, and ultimate power.

Racialized-gendered Experiences and Mental Health Vulnerabilities of Young Asian Women in Toronto, Canada

Discourses of mental health vulnerabilities of women in the Asian diaspora s are often invoked through the concepts of “culture” with little consideration of asymmetric power relations and structural influences. We used a narrative approach to explore the experiences and perspectives on culture, identities, relationships, and mental health among young Asian women living in Toronto, Canada. We engaged 14 participants in focus groups and individual interviews, and identified four overall themes: (1) racialized-gendered bodily abjection, (2) experiences of enacted racism and sexism, (3) perceptions of familial expectations, and (4) their strategies of coping and resilience. Our analysis revealed how Whiteness and structural violence shape the racialized-gendered experiences of young Asian women and perpetuate microaggressions that compromise their mental health and well-being. Critical nursing practice must question the idea of “culture” embedded in the dominant discourse of “culturally competent” care. Nurses need to achieve structural competence to dismantle systems of oppression and unequal power relations.

The Extinctionist Man

This essay explores how critical necropolitical frameworks bring to light, not only exploited subjugation, but the quality of doom, destruction and collapse embedded in masculine expression. It elaborates on how the proto-patriarchal view of death, or more accurately the prospective view towards it, emerges from a skewed narrative fixture, in which ‘life’ is determined by what it isn’t, ‘death.’ Similar to the dissociative and occultive schisms in the patriarchal rationale of life forms, such as the opposition of ‘man’ to ‘woman’ or ‘human’ to ‘animal,’ the concept of death is realized into an abject non-place inhabited by subjectivities of “fucking” and “killing.” Puncturing this staging of ‘alive’ patriarchal function, the necropolitical presents the condition of death as a possible flourishing identity and an already-present frontier of human expression, where ‘life’ and ‘death’ aren’t separate entities to one another but enmeshed, as if in masquerade of one another. The essay also provides critique and caution on how fiction and theory transpire into ‘staged’ realities, especially in the manifestation of the abject body. Its concluding remarks support the inclusion of “straightness” in fluid sexual discourse by highlighting how the appropriation and possession of traditional and existing social roles, rather than only those in defiance or at their fringe, has birthed the concepts of kineticism and fluidity in sexual expression. Author(s): Ahmad Makia Title (English): The Extinctionist Man Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 19, No. 1-2 (2022). Publisher: Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities - Skopje Page Range: 92-106 Page Count: 14 Citation (English): Ahmad Makia, "The Extinctionist Man,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 19, No. 1-2 (2022): 92-106. Author Biography Ahmad Makia, Independent Researcher Ahmad Makia is a writer and publisher from the United Arab Emirates. He currently operates under the publishing alias HOUSE and heads the publications department of the Sharjah Art Foundation

Artistic labour in dance and painting: revisiting the theory-practice debate via mimesis (Anukrti) and the abject body

ABSTRACT This article will critically explore how the intersection of mimesis and labour may open up another perspective on the much-theorized relationship between practice (prayoga) and theory (śāstra) in dance and painting. Labour or śrama, a loaded term by itself, will be taken in its complex sense of not only involving labour as skill that informs acts of painting, acting-dancing but also as a thematic of representation. Interspersed into these two senses is ritual labour or the labour involving acts of propitiating the divine – a domain not sufficiently thought out beyond the truism that religion pervades all spheres of Indic life. What this mode of inquiry aims to bring out is a tense relationship between manual/artistic labour and ritual labour both as a site of complicity and conflict amongst the actor-dancers and the authors of the treatises.

Suzhi, Guanxi, and the Abject Body: Nonhuman Agents of Paradox that Perform Identity Work Together With Chinese Women Political Leaders

Governmental politics in China continue to be a male-dominated arena such that Chinese women political leaders often carefully perform contested gender and occupational identities to negotiate a work-body (mis)alignment. Turning to sociomateriality, this study examines how gender and organizational paradox comes to matter as Chinese women negotiate the occupational identity of political leaders. The study simultaneously explores the types of identity work women leaders perform and the nonhuman actors they routinely encounter while working to make boundaries that outline the identity of political leaders. A thematic narrative analysis reveals the following: Suzhi work(s), guanxi work(s), and abject body work(s). Participants perform identity work constitutive of the masculine shapes/bodies of political suzhi and guanxi, while forming the abject body of a symbolic woman. Meanwhile, these bodies serve as working actors that move and touch participants in paradoxical ways.

더 나은 배관설비를 위하여: 베케트 후기 작품에 나타난 King Lear에 대한 문학적 암시

This paper tries to understand the nature of Beckett’s literary allusion by way of analyzing the literary allusions to King Lear appearing in his later English texts. King Lear and Beckett’s works bear similarities in terms of the theme of the failure of divine reward, the experiment in human misery and sufferings and the element of the grotesque pantomime. As a frame of reference for our study, there are three major case studies on Beckett’s literary allusions respectively undertaken by Gontarski, Knowlson and Caselli, which respectively shed light on the echoes in the mythical patterns, the generality of quotation and its sensory embodiment and the self-reflective and ironical intertextuality. As this paper analyzes Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho and Endgame as the three representative cases of Beckett’s literary allusion to King Lear, Ill Seen Ill Said’s quotation of “vile jelly” is, firstly, found to create profound thematic echoes between the fruitless efforts of its camera-eye and those of Gloucester in King Lear. In terms of the general quotation and its sensory embodiment, the text echoes the senility dramatized in King Lear by materializing the frailty of the one frail remaining eye and the abject body of the old woman. The case of ironical intertextuality in the work is performed in the way in which, the better one understands King Lear, the better one can understands the work in allusion to it itself, as a subtle device in the text bringing about the inversion between origin and product. Worstward Ho sets Edgar’s line “the worst is not so long as we can say ‘This is the worst’” as a very important preoccupation as well as the most important thematic thread in the work. Endgame illustrates similarities to, and influences from, King Lear in its ethos and pathos. Peter Brook’s iconic 1962 production King Lear so effectively witnessed to and exploited those similarities as to alter the general interpretation as well as the critical opinion of the Shakespearean original. As Beckett himself explained, these literary allusions are like “bits of pipe” that he carefully and meticulously chose for a better working literary construction.

On Second Thought

On Second Thought

On Second Thought

On Second Thought

Alfredo Joskowicz: Corporeal abjection and counterculture in independent Mexican cinema after 1968

This article examines three films by Mexican filmmaker Alfredo Joskowicz (1937–2012) in the context of the emergence of independent Mexican cinema. As a direct product of the 1968 Student Movement, this filmic corpus stood in direct opposition to the industrial, state-subsidized cinema that was perceived as an emissary of national discursive hegemony. My analysis foregrounds the representation of corporeal abjection as one of the main tropes through which these films enacted countercultural insurrection. I also aim to demonstrate how these three films represent shifts in Joskowicz’s ideological perspective, and how they correspond to the State’s intensifying repression and the concomitant radicalization of leftist opposition. I argue that Jokowicz’s initial representation of bodily abjection first stood as the emblem of an authentic dissidence predicated on biopolitical insurrection, and later acquired a negative, necropolitical valence that effectively delimited a great part of independent cinema’s political-ideological horizon.

Abject bodies and toxic flows in Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats

In the seventh month of Jane Takagi-Little’s narration of her ‘year of meats’, she explains her incredulity at the dirty secret she finds within the preface of Fry’s Grammar School Geography: the essential conflict of man versus life. Ruth Ozeki’s novel My Year of Meats (1998) exposes the flows of power, violence and materiality that connect us with the meat we eat, the food we cook, and the ways we buy it in a globalized, capitalist world. This paper focuses on how the abject and the toxic, as they manifest across female and animal bodies, troubles the notion of a delineated sovereign subject. Instead, these processes can be seen as transgressing and dissolving the bounds of the body, and in doing so, also cause a slippage between other normative binaries; between inside and outside, self and other, and human and food. Abjection and toxicity are related but divergent embodied experiences in the novel and reveal how American food production and consumption contaminates across the scales of the environment, the transnational and the body. For this novel, meat is so much more than what’s for dinner.