Abstract In this Research paper and through my Studio practice, I search for what binds me and separates me from my children. I investigate abjection theories through Julia Kristeva and Georges Bataille and focus on a particular form I call the maternal abject. This occurs at the time an infant separates from its mother, acquires language and maps its own body. I am proposing that the mapping of the body is the point at which an individual perceives social structures and learns about prohibitions and taboos, hence the abject. I also investigate the relationship between the maternal abject and the artistic process through the writings of Kristeva. Abjection is illustrated through the works of Mona Hatoum, Fiona Hall, Hieronymus Bosch, and Paul Quinn. The maternal abject is illustrated through the works of Mary Kelly, Cindy Sherman, Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois. A possible reading of the maternal abject is given through the works of Gregory Crewdson, Joel-Peter Witkin and Francis Bacon. The studio work is in two parts. The first part is a series of layered photomedia images. The layers consist of a naked female body, which has been merged with Renaissance like Madonna and Child images. Texture, such as stones and spikes, is embedded to signify the fragility and strength of the body. Children are also present and are merged with the adult female body. All images are cradled in a darkened atmosphere in order to draw the viewer inside the images. The second part is a bassinet, which has been drilled and pierced by thousands of pearl-headed steel pins. This piece signifies the dichotomy of the motherhood experience, which on the one hand is rewarding and fulfilling and on the other an abject and isolating experience of no apparent economic value. The two parts interact so that the bassinet piece with its threatening exterior acts as an aggressor towards the photomedia images.

<p>This is a study of the novel <em>Mes mauvaises pensées</em> (2005) by the French writer Nina Bouraoui. I use an intertextual comparative method, where I read the novel against three intertexts: Marie Cardinal <em>Les mots pour le dire</em> (1975), the David Lynch movie <em>Mulholland Drive </em>(2001) and novels and photographies by Hervé Guibert. Main focus is on the relation between body and language. Using the psychoanalytic theories by Julia Kristeva I examine the melancholy of the narrator in <em>Mes mauvaises pensées</em>. The melancholic subject mourns a Thing which is the unrepresentable archaic mother. Melancholy is connected to the notion of exile; the subject belongs to a lost place in the past which it is still holding on to. The narrator of <em>Mes mauvaises pensées</em> is still living in her childhood, even though she is a grown up woman. I show how the place from where she speaks is the child. The female body and the female sexuality are not represented in the text, there is a missing link between the female body and it’s representation in language – in the symbolic order. According to Kristeva the melancholic denies the loss of the Thing – in the end the mother – and clings to the unrepresentable void. By realizing and acknowledging the loss one can reconstruct the bond to the archaic mother in language. Bouraoui’s failure in writing <em>the feminine</em> into the text is interesting because it puts lights on the conditions of writing the body for women. The theory of l’écriture féminine is an inspiration for the analyses and I contrast it to Judith Butler’s idea of gender performativity. There is a conflict in what constitutes gender and sex between psychoanalysis and queer theory, which is also found in the narrator in Bouraoui’s novel – trying to create herself through pure performativity she never succeeds to act independently of the mother and the female body.</p>

This is a study of the novel Mes mauvaises pensées (2005) by the French writer Nina Bouraoui. I use an intertextual comparative method, where I read the novel against three intertexts: Marie Cardinal Les mots pour le dire (1975), the David Lynch movie Mulholland Drive (2001) and novels and photographies by Hervé Guibert. Main focus is on the relation between body and language. Using the psychoanalytic theories by Julia Kristeva I examine the melancholy of the narrator in Mes mauvaises pensées. The melancholic subject mourns a Thing which is the unrepresentable archaic mother. Melancholy is connected to the notion of exile; the subject belongs to a lost place in the past which it is still holding on to. The narrator of Mes mauvaises pensées is still living in her childhood, even though she is a grown up woman. I show how the place from where she speaks is the child. The female body and the female sexuality are not represented in the text, there is a missing link between the female body and it’s representation in language – in the symbolic order. According to Kristeva the melancholic denies the loss of the Thing – in the end the mother – and clings to the unrepresentable void. By realizing and acknowledging the loss one can reconstruct the bond to the archaic mother in language. Bouraoui’s failure in writing the feminine into the text is interesting because it puts lights on the conditions of writing the body for women. The theory of l’écriture féminine is an inspiration for the analyses and I contrast it to Judith Butler’s idea of gender performativity. There is a conflict in what constitutes gender and sex between psychoanalysis and queer theory, which is also found in the narrator in Bouraoui’s novel – trying to create herself through pure performativity she never succeeds to act independently of the mother and the female body.

Within the field of Disability Studies, research on cognitive and developmental disabilities is relatively rare in comparison to other types of disabilities. Using Clifford Geertz's anthropological approach, "thick description," autism can be better understood by placing both fiction and non-fiction accounts of the disorder into a larger theoretical context. Applying concepts from existing works in Disability Studies to the major writings of Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, and Donna Haraway also proves to be mutually enlightening. This ethnographic approach within the context of analysis of literary texts provides a model by which representations of individuals who are cognitively or developmentally disabled can be included in the academy.

This essay examines the role of repetition in the two novels Älskaren (The Lover) by Marguerite Duras and Den amerikanska flickan (The American Girl) by Monika Fagerholm, through a thematic and comparative reading. The study mainly uses Bruce F. Kawin’s analysis of repetition in literature and language as well as it refers to Cathy Jellenik and her analysis of rewriting in the works of Duras. The study also takes into Julia Kristeva’s idea of Duras as a writer lacking of catharsis. Furthermore, the essay analyses both novels by applying Sigmund Freud’s term “repetition compulsion”. The essay shows how Fagerholm and Duras both use permissive writing, which means that the authors boldly write clichéd replications in their texts. Both writers practice what Kristeva calls “an aesthetics of awkwardness”. Aswell, the authors both question whether a story at all is able to be told: they work with what Jellenik calls “an aesthetics of doubt”, but in different ways. Moreover, by using the work of Kawin, the essay shows how the authors have different ways of handling time. The study shows indications of repetition compulsion in the characters and also exemplifies instances of what Kristeva calls “reduplication”. Through this a fragmentary and Nietzschean perspective of the self is displayed in the novels. The study review how Duras can be said to be a writer lacking of catharsis, while Fagerholm on the other hand liberates one of her protagonists from repetition compulsion by allowing the character to undergo a catharsis. Finally, the essay conclusion points out that Duras and Fagerholm are postmodern writers who know how to challenge the concept of truth. Even if they are different writers in many aspects, they both use repetition as a method to express something unspeakable. They can be said to write also by an aesthetics of search for the truth; a search for an origin tale which they both argue as biased and is therefore impossible to capture.

Abstract In this Research paper and through my Studio practice, I search for what binds me and separates me from my children. I investigate abjection theories through Julia Kristeva and Georges Bataille and focus on a particular form I call the maternal abject. This occurs at the time an infant separates from its mother, acquires language and maps its own body. I am proposing that the mapping of the body is the point at which an individual perceives social structures and learns about prohibitions and taboos, hence the abject. I also investigate the relationship between the maternal abject and the artistic process through the writings of Kristeva. Abjection is illustrated through the works of Mona Hatoum, Fiona Hall, Hieronymus Bosch, and Paul Quinn. The maternal abject is illustrated through the works of Mary Kelly, Cindy Sherman, Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois. A possible reading of the maternal abject is given through the works of Gregory Crewdson, Joel-Peter Witkin and Francis Bacon. The studio work is in two parts. The first part is a series of layered photomedia images. The layers consist of a naked female body, which has been merged with Renaissance like Madonna and Child images. Texture, such as stones and spikes, is embedded to signify the fragility and strength of the body. Children are also present and are merged with the adult female body. All images are cradled in a darkened atmosphere in order to draw the viewer inside the images. The second part is a bassinet, which has been drilled and pierced by thousands of pearl-headed steel pins. This piece signifies the dichotomy of the motherhood experience, which on the one hand is rewarding and fulfilling and on the other an abject and isolating experience of no apparent economic value. The two parts interact so that the bassinet piece with its threatening exterior acts as an aggressor towards the photomedia images.

This thesis interrogates the ways in which the body-centred practices of women film artists embrace the materiality of direct animation in order to foreground gendered, subjective positions. Through the researcher's own creative practice, it investigates how this mode of film-making, in which the artist works through physical engagement with the film materials and the material processes of film-making, might be understood as feminine and/or feminist. Direct animation foregrounds touch as the primary sense. Its practices are process-based and highly experimental, because images are made through the agency of the body operating within restrictive parameters, making results difficult to predict or control with precision. For these reasons, direct animation has not been embraced by mainstream, narrative-focused, studio-based models of production, unlike other forms of two and three dimensional animation. It has remained a specialist area for the individual artist and auteur, and, to date, there is a paucity of commentary about direct animation practices, and what exists has been dominated by male voices. In order to develop ideas about the ways in which women represent themselves in an expanded film-making praxis that is focused on the body and materiality of process, this PhD inquiry, encompassing a body of films with written contextualisation, is situated in the context of the direct animation practices of three artists (Caroline Leaf, Annabel Nicolson, and Margaret Tait); and informed by conceptual frameworks provided by Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous. This thesis proposes, via interaction between these three axes of research, that women film artists, operating independently, are able to create a female imaginary that represents women and is recognised by them, by constructing positions of practice outside the dominant symbolic modes of patriarchy, which evolve through the maternal body and the materialities of the feminine.

No description available.

Sylvia Plath’s poetry continues to receive considerable attention from a variety of groups and has been the target for such diverse critical approaches as Feminism, Ecocriticism, and Marxism, to name but a few. My paper focuses on a less investigated area of her poems: Space, and more specifically uncanny space in her later poetry. Here, I take a closer look at seven of her poems using as my preferred methods deconstruction and psychoanalytical theory.

This study employs psychoanalytical theories to explore how the conscious, unconscious, and subconscious workings of the mind, combined with a search for identity, are presented and dealt with in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987). It is done through a close reading and in-depth textual analysis of thematic concerns raised in the work. Previous research has primarily relied on some specific aspects of psychoanalytic theory and applied it to Beloved. The theoretical framework provides a rationale for this paper to research two events in particular that highlight the mother-daughter relationships between Sethe and her Ma’am and between Sethe and her daughter Beloved. These relationships are consequently analyzed by employing psychoanalytical concepts offered by Freud, Lacan and Kristeva. By utilizing psychoanalytical criticism, the characters’ conscious and unconscious motives and feelings are revealed and explained, as well as the meanings and the undercurrents that lie underneath the text’s consciousness. The results suggest that Sethe murdered her daughter Beloved to keep her from becoming a slave and enduring the dreadful and traumatic consequences of slavery, which was similar to what Sethe went through when she was abandoned by her Ma'am. Sethe’s childhood psychological principles and trauma shaped her identity as a mother as she witnessed her mother abandoning her at a young age by being tortured and killed. The events around Sethe’s mother’s death and the fact that Sethe never identifies her mother’s dead body, scar Sethe for life and instill in Sethe a sense of “lack” and an abnormal feeling of maternal love where she is ready to kill her children to save them from the horror of slavery.