Abjection
by
There is a widely held understanding of what political art from minoritarian communities looks like: accessible, uplifting, humanizing, unifying. What do scholars and students of gender and sexuality make, then, of politically inclined queer and of color artists who use strategies that seem counterintuitive—that embrace and often embody abstraction, illegibility, and dejection? A useful rubric to help us understand the work of their aesthetic strategies is that of abjection. In everyday use, the word abjection signals debasement and extreme societal rejection. Abjection’s scholarly genealogy reveals a complex dynamic that might help us understand the ways we are constituted as individuals in relation, imbricated in rubrics of power. Abjection is commonly understood as the process of social or psychological casting out of undesirables in order to consolidate a norm or ideal but also the condition of being undesirable. Two significant theorists whose writings bring psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and social and political thought together in conversations are Julia Kristeva and Georges Bataille. Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection and Bataille’s writings on abjection and his essay “L’Informe” have had a profound influence on gender and sexuality studies, particularly in those corners of the field that engage theories of political aesthetics, such...
This essay may be found on page 11 of the printed volume.