Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of the Witwatersrand, Arts Faculty (Fine Arts), 1999 / My basic premise in this study is, if abjection is a psychosocial phenomenon, even a kind of waste category and mechanism, it should be discernible and analysable as an underlying structure in the form, iconography and purpose of works of art. Certain modes of art will manifest or express it more lucidly and abundantly than others. Satire and the Grotesque, which Goya adopts in his graphic Work, are especially fruitful in this regard. In both, one can find processes and states of degradation and vitiation that accord with the two facets of abjection Hal Foster (1996) so pragmatically terms the operation to abject and the condition to be abject. Satire, with its inclination to criticise political, social and ecclesiastical figures, can chiefly be interpreted in terms of the operation to abject (to lower, cast down, depose, sideline), while the Grotesque, displaying the distorted, monstrous, 'freakish', hybrid, impossible, relates more to tire condition to be abject. This conjunction between satire/the Grotesque and abjection guides my interpretation of Los Caprichos and Los Disparates. Los Caprichos, in which Goya took it upon himself to "censure" and "ridicule" "human errors and vices", are marked by a quite strict use of satire to criticise, mock and marginalise certain social groups (prostitutes, nobles and corrupt clerics, in particular). Since society, or the Symbolic that undergirds it, cannot do without the abject, either in its role as midden or as oppositional determinant or defining other, the satirical project cannot banish or destroy the abject; it can, however, bid and lobby for some degree of social reclamation and rejuvenation. The satirist depicts the grotesque, sordid, obscene, deviant, abandoned and licentious to indicate to the viewer/reader what s/h e must laugh off to live a decent, obedient, constructive and law-fearing life. Goya takes this aapproach in Los Caprichos. After all, in at least one letter to his friend Martin Zapater he hinted that he feared the "witches, goblins, phantoms, arrogant giants, knaves" and "scoundrels" of his society, and evidently felt a need to part from them. How deep this need ran one cannot say; many of his images suggest a degree of equivocation (he vacillates between being on the side of the law and on the side of Ms own more incorruptible conscience, from which he upbraids the law) and ambivalence (on the one hand, he scolds his objects of attack and appears to be repelled by them; on the other, he seems to relish depicting them in grotesque and blighted shapes, as if the satirical purpose is secondary to the opportunity his art provides to invent forms and get close to the forbidden, the anti-social, the rotten, the abject). In Los Disparates equivocation and ambivalence come more to the fore. Goya often appears most aggressively satirical in the Disparates when he questions corruption in social institutions such as tire Church and the law. Some images, notably Folhj of the Mass, juxtapose a wrathful figure with a mass of social ills, foibles and depravities, and seem characteristically satirical, but the majority of the etchings are striking in their lack of closure, as if a "state of unresolved tension", to quote Michael Steig, adequately rewarded Goya for the labour of production. Man xoandering among Phantoms, for example, is ambiguous and seems to sum up Goya's relationsMp to the abject toward the end of his life: through the surrogate of an old man, Goya appears to have struck a deal with the abject; submerged in it, corrupted by it, impure, but nevertheless sufficiently single-minded to find an identity separate from it. Complicit, but differentiated: all subjects stand in this way to the abject. In Los Desastres, especially given that I do not deal with the Caprichos Enfdticos section of the series, my interpretation is determined less by satire than by the question of how an antagonistic nation uses war as a mechanism of conclusive abjection to extend military, political and, ultimately. Symbolic influence - by means of sanctioned murder, execution, even rape - over another nation, w ith the aim of making that nation succumb to the abjection of surrender and the imposition of a foreign Symbolic. War also produces heaps of corpses and, in the occupied cities, ill and starving destitutes: those reduced to conditions of permanent or near-permanent abjection by war's ballistic exacerbation of the operation to abject. Contact with abjection through art strengthens, weakens and expands the self. It carries the threat of immersion in the repressed and the promise of risque pleasure - both from the diminution of unpleasure through the making or viewing of art, and the more positive pleasure of jouissance. Contact with abjection allows, further, for the complicated experience of being liminal, grotesque and abject oneself while caught between the poles of the Symbolic and tire abject. Whether we, as makers an d /o r viewers, criticise or joy in it, abjection holds out the alluring prospect of catharsis and temporary relief both from its own hazards and the rigours and inhibitions of social life. Goya, it would appear, found this intervenient condition compelling enough to return to it - if he ever truly left it - over a period of almost three decades through the medium of the three graphic series I explore in this dissertation.

O trabalho objetiva uma análise da obra A Confissão de Lúcio de Mário de Sá-Carneiro, pelas perspectivas do gênero e do sexo, do duplo e do abjeto, construídas através dos e nos protagonistas LúcioMartaRicardo. Elaborados como partes da ambigüidade realizada sob os desejos eróticos e relacionamentos auto-homoheterossexuais, nos quais as relações humanas representam uma entrega erótica, os personagens podem ser conseqüentemente vinculados às identidades não predominantes ou não normativas (como, por exemplo, a homossexualidade). Percebe-se uma intensão de Mário de Sá-Carneiro de transgredir as leis da natureza, não só pela projeção da alma como também pela tentativa de encontrar o outro, o duplo. Nesta linha de pensamento, vê-se na obra, portanto, uma atitude de identificação com as idéias da abjeção de questionamento à ordem estabelecida, na qual à controvérsia das identidades de gênero em relação ao posicionamento do femininomasculino dos personagens se vincula uma pretensão de vínculo do material com o espiritual. É importante ressaltar que para esta análise foram utilizados, como focos, os princípios teóricos de Julia Kristeva (abjeção), Judith Butler (sexo e gênero), Sigmund Freud (Psicanálise), bem como os do próprio autor e do modernismo português. / The present work aims to analyse the book A Confissão de Lúcio from Mário de Sá-Carneiro, for the perspectives of the sort and the sex, of the double one and the abject one, constructed through and in the protagonists Lúcio-Marta-Ricardo. Elaborated as sexual parts of the ambiguity carried through under the erotic desires and relationships auto-homo-heterosexuals, in which the relations human beings represent a erotic delivery, the personages can consequently be tied with the not predominant or not normative identities (as, for example, to the homosexuality). An intension of Mário de Sá-Carneiro is perceived to transgress the laws of the nature, for the projection of the soul as well as for the attempt to find the other, the double one. In this line of thought, it is seen in the book, therefore, an attitude of identification with the ideas of the abjection of questioning to the established order, in which to the controversy of the identities of sort in relation to the positioning of the feminine-masculine of the personages if it associates with a pretension of bond of the material with the spiritual. It is important to stand out that for this analysis had been used, as centers of interest, the theoretical principles of Julia Kristeva (abjection), Judith Butler (sex and sort), Sigmund Freud (Psychoanalysis), as well as the ones of the proper author and the portuguese modernism.

Student Number : 9803476V - MA research report - School of Arts - Faculty of Humanities / By drawing on contemporary scholarship that addresses spectatorship in the cinema generally, and in the horror genre specifically, I analyze the perverse pleasure afforded by The Blair Witch Project. To do this I argue that pleasure in horror is afforded through the masochistic positioning of the viewer, especially in relation to psychoanalytic theories surrounding gender in spectator positioning. I also look at the way the film re-deploys conventions, both documentary conceptions of the ‘real’, as well as generic expectations of horror, to activate the perverse pleasure of horror.

This thesis investigates the multiple readings that arise when the division between the biological and technological is interrupted--here abjection is key because the 
binary between abjection and gadgetry gives multiple meanings to other binaries, including male/female. Using David Cronenberg’s Videodrome and eXistenZ, I argue that multiple readings arise because of people’s participation with electronically mediated technology. Indeed, abjection is salient because Cronenberg’s films present an ambivalent relationship between people and technology; this relationship is often an uneasy one because technology changes people on both a somatic and cognitive level.

Many consider Oldboy be the defining film of the most recent wave of South Korean cinema, with scholars such as Terrence McSweeney and Kim Kyun Hyun arguing the film's representation of South Korean culture through collective memory, trauma, and Westernization. However, most of the current scholarship that surrounds the film does not adequately address the film's prominent theme of incest. My thesis explores the anxious implications of the film's incestuous imagery and reads it as a figure for the film's transnational presence. Specifically, in my project, incest is the nucleus on which I build each argument outward. First through abjection and desire for self and other, onto telesthesia and desire for private and public, then finally, transnationalism and the desire for national and global. These desires we typically take as binaries, but in fact, we experience an anxiety of being simultaneously on both sides of the binary. I argue that attentiveness Oldboy`s representation of the incest taboo brings necessary nuances to the current scholarship that surrounds it: Contemporary South Korean culture cannot be a primary focus, as South Korea has always been entangled within an "other", be it through Colonization, Westernization, or more recently telecommunications. In conclusion, by closely examining the incest taboo in Oldboy, this project sheds light on the simultaneity within the desires of self and other, private and public, and finally, national and global.

This thesis examines the ways in which a small group of young Pākehā women use underwear to construct a range of complex gendered subjectivities. I explore how these subjectivities are influenced by both material and discursive spaces. Three underwear shops in Hamilton, New Zealand - Bendon Lingerie Outlet, Bras N Things and Farmers, and various visual representations depicting contemporary notions of normative femininity, are under investigation Feminist poststructuralist theories and methodologies provide the framework for this research. One focus group and three semi-structured interviews were conducted with young women who purchase and wear underwear. Participant observations of shoppers in Bendon Lingerie Outlet, Hamilton and autobiographical journal entries of my experiences as a retailer and consumer of underwear continued throughout the research. Advertising and promotional material in underwear shops and a DVD of a Victoria's Secret lingerie show are also examined. Three points frame the analysis. First, I argue that underwear consumption spaces are discursively constructed as feminine. The socio-political structures governing these spaces construct particular types of bodies. These bodies are positioned as either 'in' place or 'out' of place. Second, underwear shops can be understood as feminised, young and thin embodied spaces. Bodies that fit this description are hence positioned as 'in' place. However, female bodies that are 'fat' and/or old and male bodies are marginalised within the space and thus positioned as 'out' of place. Third, I consider particular forms of normative femininity by examining the ways in which underwear disciplines and contains the body. Women's underwear moulds and shapes flesh to fit contemporary feminine norms. Examining the specific relationship between the body, underwear and space provides a means to re-theorise geography and makes new ground for understanding how clothed bodies are constituted in and through space.

This research considers the performance of situated subjectivity where the state and the individual vie for dominion over the drives that construct the body as what one has (the body as object), as what one is (the body as subject), and as what one becomes (the absent body). To turn power into pain, the State prospects the body of the subject to anchor its power through abjection. In so doing, it compels that body to channel the abject as a power to be wielded as a weapon of the weak, thus forcing into view the true interior of the State. Sections I and II position a discourse of trauma in Singapore using a parenthetical framework that is constructed by and mediated through the criminalized and punishable bodies of two young Asian males. The first discusses the carefully constructed ob-scene (off-stage) nature of the obscene (abhorrent) execution of convicted drug trafficker Van Nguyen in 2005 (the body as object); the second examines its inverse – the public spectacle of creative ‘death’ imposed upon artist Josef Ng (the body as subject) through government condemnation and expulsion for an alleged obscene (immoral) performance at 5th Passage in 1994. To do this, the thesis engages with the enforced interchangeable processes of disembodiment (for the display of symbolic violence) and embodiment (for the exertion of physical violence). Comparisons are also made of the way the State demonstrates its preparedness to turn the display of power into a process of exacting the ultimate pain from the punishable body. This is perpetrated on the one hand via a spectacle of invisibility that keeps the mandatory death penalty a secretive process, and on the other, its inverse, the publicly staged media spectacle of persecuting performance artist/s and 5th Passage. The events that follow led to the defacto banning of performance art and 5th Passage’s demise in 1994, ending my role as its artistic director. By relocating the performance of death from the high courts and offices of Singapore’s Home Affairs Ministry (the site of symbolic violence) and Changi Prison (site of physical violence) into plain sight in the Australian media, the press is discussed as an instrumental force in deploying a penal counter-aesthetic to pierce through Singapore’s veil of secrecy surrounding its executions. The thesis demonstrates how this engendered a ‘seeing through’ that galvanized acts of intersubjectivity and the performance of social witnessing in Australia as an attempt to save Van Nguyen from the gallows. The institutional censorship of an artwork about the execution in 2005 is discussed to show how signifying practices such as visual art continued to agitate the state’s performance to construct itself as a “global city for arts and culture” on one hand while crushing artistic subjectivity when it is perceived as dissent on the other. This glimpse into the fragility of the Singapore nation’s divergent desires, where one performance portrays the disintegration of another, recalled the originary cultural rupture at 5th Passage in 1994 when artists engaged in performance were sensationalized in the Singapore media as social deviants. As an extension of state apparatus, the media is shown to repress artistic subjectivity through its creation of a controversy that led to the illegitimization of scriptless performance art, thus producing a distinctively Singaporean cultural artefact – the absent body. Out of the personal and social trauma framed by this confrontation with the state, Section III presents a body of visual work that I have since produced in the period marked by these two events (between 1994 to 2008) as a reply to the state. From this place of banishment, the thesis traces its evolvement into the body machine (Rich Manoeuvre series) as part of a practice that sees it for what it is within the paternal order, to locate the points where fragility occur. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2006. / Title from title screen. Audrey Goodman, committee chair; Pearl Mchaney, Christopher Kocela, committee members. Electronic text (99 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Apr. 25, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 95-99).

Throughout his career, Stephen King has created child protagonists and adults with a childlike acceptance of the world who represent “good.” These children and adults are able to observe and fight evil, especially supernatural evil, on a level that close-minded adults are unable to because of their imagination. At the same, King also has a history of adhering to traditional representations of sex in his work, presenting heteronormative relationships as good and transgressive sexualities as evil. Often, these child protagonists are faced with sexuality as a threatening, evil force. In The Shining, Danny Torrance undergoes a forced sexual awakening that aids him in defeating the Overlook Hotel; in ’Salem’s Lot, Mark Petrie is represented as a virginal hero who helps Ben Mears in defeating vampires, yet suffers as a result; in It, King aligns seven children’s journey to defeat evil with their literal sexual awakenings, but at the cost of his female characters. These novels represent a disconnect between what appear to be King’s purpose in sexual representation and what their message to the reader actually are, which is indicative of the underlying problems of his traditional, black-and-white attitude toward sexuality in his fiction.

<p>This dissertation explores the concept of <italic>agential abjection</italic> through Jean Genet's involvement with and writings about the struggles of disenfranchised and pathologized peoples. Following Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler has argued that modern subjectivity requires the production of a domain of abjected beings denied subjecthood and forced to live "unlivable" lives. "Agencies of Abjection" brings these feminist theories of abjection to bear on the multiple coordinates of social difference by exploring forms of abjection linked to sexuality, criminality, colonialism, and racialization. Situating Genet within an archive that includes the writings of former inmates of penal colonies, Francophone intellectuals, and Black Panther Party members, I analyze both the historical forces that produce abjection and the collective forms of agency that emerge from subaltern social forms. I find that the abjected are often able to elaborate impure, perverse, and contingent forms of agency from within the very institutions and discourses that would deny them subjecthood. </p><p>"Agencies of Abjection" carefully situates Genet's writing within the discursive fields in which it intervenes, including that of the memoirs and testimonies of former inmates of the boys' penal colonies, of Francophone decolonizing poets and intellectuals, and of Black Panther prison writings. This method illuminates subaltern genealogies of thought on the problems of abjection, subjection, and subaltern agency so central to Genet's writing. By charting the twists and turns between Genet's writing and that of other subaltern writers of abjection, "Agencies of Abjection" reads Genet as a thinker continually involved in a process of exchange, intervention, borrowing, and revision concerning the specific histories and experiences of social abjection.</p> / Dissertation