Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1478003022 ISBN 13: 9781478003021

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2020

Synopsis

From the films of Larry Clark to the feminist comedy of Amy Schumer to the fall of Louis C. K., comedic, graphic, and violent moments of abjection have permeated twentieth- and twenty-first-century social and political discourse. The contributors to Abjection Incorporated move beyond simple critiques of abjection as a punitive form of social death, illustrating how it has become a contested mode of political and cultural capital—empowering for some but oppressive for others. Escaping abjection's usual confines of psychoanalysis and aesthetic modernism, core to theories of abjection by thinkers such as Kristeva and Bataille, the contributors examine a range of media, including literature, photography, film, television, talking dolls, comics, and manga. Whether analyzing how comedic abjection can help mobilize feminist politics or how expressions of abjection inflect class, race, and gender hierarchies, the contributors demonstrate the importance of competing uses of abjection to contemporary society and politics. They emphasize abjection's role in circumscribing the boundaries of the human and how the threats abjection poses to the self and other, far from simply negative, open up possibilities for radically new politics.

Contributors. Meredith Bak, Eugenie Brinkema, James Leo Cahill, Michelle Cho, Maggie Hennefeld, Rob King, Thomas Lamarre, Sylvère Lotringer, Rijuta Mehta, Mark Mulroney, Nicholas Sammond, Yiman Wang, Rebecca Wanzo

About this title

About the Author:

Maggie Hennefeld is Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and author of Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes.

Nicholas Sammond is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto and author of Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation, also published by Duke University Press.

Review:

“Abjection Incorporated makes a strong case for the abject as an important political space for confrontations between identities assigned and performed. Even as many seek to displace the subject as a meaningful category of analysis and action, these essays demonstrate that the fundamental tension between the fragility of self and the abjection of otherness remains a viable and quite possibly unavoidable foundation for cultural theory and criticism.” -- Jeffrey Sconce, author of, The Technical Delusion: Electronics, Power, Insanity

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2020
• ISBN 10: 1478003022
• ISBN 13: 9781478003021
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 344
• Editor: Hennefeld Maggie, Sammond Nicholas