Abjection

Barbara Gowdy’s collection of short stories from We So Seldom Look on Love revolves around the foils and tropes of the disabled child, or those who are coined as the ‘other’. This essay will focus on Gowdy’s short story “Body and Soul”, which can be read in regards to the Julia Kristeva’s literary theory of abjection. This is because the short story begins with Terry’s abjection as an infant, and ends with Julie being disposed to a psychiatric home. Arguably, Gowdy’s short story can be perceived of how the disable-bodied individual is rejected, and repressed within society, because they are labelled as the vulnerable. Arguably, the status of being recognized as vulnerable is because of the individual’s physical difference, which consequently…

revelation that vampires exist and want to become a visible part of the community. However, vampires must deal with abjection as they enter society: “We had all the other minorities in our little town-why not the newest,” Sookie Stackhouse, the novel’s protagonist, thinks, locating the vampire as the other. The normative boundaries are breaking down for both Sookie and the community where she lives as they are forced to incorporate the peculiarities of the vampires. It is this confrontation with…

In the Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva analyzes the concept of the abject in terms of the subject (self) and object (other). Abjection is one’s reaction when faced with taboo elements, because society perpetually implements this notion that, in order to be whole and pure, one must abstain from committing actions that are against the law, or in religious terms, one must abstain from sinful acts; Kristeva writes that “abjection persists as exclusion or taboo (dietary or other) in monotheistic…

circumstances that generate it. As mentioned earlier, it is for this reason that the study combines essentially the psychoanalytic concepts of abjection and The Uncanny in order to achieve a comprehensive analysis. On one side, the concept of abjection enables the study to analyse the horrific incidences that emanate from characters’ disgust caused by the disturbance of social order. On the other side, ‘The Uncanny’ in this study complements the Abjection in the examination of the terrifying…

contradiction to the id. In a similar fashion, Mick works against Davies. As discussed earlier Davies represents id, the pre-narcissist stage of infancy. His behavior is anti-normative as like an infant, he keeps on demanding things one after another from the mother(er) – here Aston, till the point the mother(er) refuses to fulfill the child’s demands and punishes him by driving him out of the house for being very demanding with the help of a stern father (Mick). Aston like Davies has been…

(McWilliams 232). Considering this, the film El Orfanato does not simply succeed due to its adherence to Hollywood horror conventions. El Orfanato instead succeeds as a film due to masterfully integrating narrative and aesthetic features that symbolize certain socio-cultural conflicts imbedded in Spanish culture. In Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre, Acevedo-Munoz summarises contemporary Spanish horror cinema perfectly, asserting that these genre of films often represent “…allegories of the…

death, a steep decline which is highlighted in her abjection to Lovelace and what he represents towards the end of the novel, her direct desire to die after her sexual assault, and her vehement preparation surrounding her own death. Notably, Clarissa is reduced to such an abject being that she passes due to in part her abjection to Lovelace himself and what he represents to her in the end of the novel. In Julia Kristeva's Powers of horror, abjection "…brings focus to the fragility of the law…"…

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The yellow wallpaper” centers around domestic abjection, regression and in some ways, female castration. This short story is in large part biographical. Charlotte Gilman is diagnosed with a nervous breakdown, and Charlotte Gilman was told that she must never write again. Gilman started to feel like she was losing her mind without writing, so she wrote “The yellow wallpaper” as an act of catharsis and also to demonstrate that an idle mind is not necessarily…

The slasher film to some viewers has been written off and categorized as a film not worth watching. Typically viewers decide that this genre may be too violent, graphic, or misogynistic. However, slasher films, like many horror movies, may offer a commentary on society or the human condition. An approach to understanding such films is through the concept of the ‘abject’. It is the disturbance of boundaries that threaten things such as an individual’s identity or societal order Abjection…

2. Abject Bodies in Society First of all, there are countless different people in the world. Everyone has a different body shape, different eyes or skin color. Each individual is unique in its own way. Yet, there are some criteria existing which determine whether you fit in into social ideologies or not. First of all, it is important to underline and explain the existence and meaning of the abject itself. In her famous essay “Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection”, Julia Kristeva comes across…