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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. Abby, Patrick, and Dan proceed through Kristeva’s many earthy examples, from food waste to vomit to excrement to corpses, and to the ideologies she perceives as relying on logics of abjection and making-abject, from hatred of mothers to antisemitism and beyond. Turning to explicitly contemporary political topics, they draw on the work of key interpreters of Kristeva to explain how the ongoing production of abject populations is vital to both real and figurative operations of boundary maintenance, oppression, and exploitation, and to core processes of state formation and policing of the public sphere. 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.
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