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In an era where migration and asylum are becoming more securitized, this article argues that unruly action by asylum seekers contributes to decolonization through challenging stratified citizenship and hierarchical immigration laws. I argue through a case of members of the Zimbabwe Vigil in London that diasporas challenge the system within their countries of settlement, enhancing self‐determination, and speak back to their homelands by demanding rights where excluded. The article draws from 20 key informant interviews conducted with members of the Zimbabwe Vigil in London and their partners on the ground in Harare, Zimbabwe. Through speaking back to the homeland, these individuals play a role in challenging coloniality within the homeland and thus are agents of decolonization. Ultimately, the article answers calls by scholars to expand and challenge the way we have conceptualized diaspora in addition to the literature on diaspora lobbying, engagement and decolonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I try to document the lived experiences of nurses who were sent to Wuhan to work in the COVID‐19 wards and consider the impact of such experiences on their psychological well‐being. I show the contextual factors in Wuhan, the inherent nature of nursing during the pandemic and the transition from the immediate reactions of nurses to long‐term impacts on their personalities, formed through the whole process of abjection. Therefore, I argue that we need to consider how nursing experiences, before, during and after their professional work in the wards, would instigate abjection within nurses. The abjection of nurses does not start only from the ward, nor does it not end in the ward. Rather, the abjection of nurses, as a reaction to lived experiences, is nuanced and the study of it can reveal rich details of nurses' life both inside and outside of the ward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine the European devaluation of maternal and female domestic labor after the Industrial Revolution as a defensive byproduct of collective male annihilation anxiety due to the replacement of male manual labor by machines. We argue that an abject attitude towards women was codified in law, economic policy and social norms that still exist today, contributing to an ongoing, unconscious, structural degradation of female caregiving. We also suggest this stance towards female labor was exported to post‐colonial nations through the global adoption of the gross domestic product statistic, which excludes domestic and maternal labor from national accounting measurements. We draw on Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, research from the fields of economics and policy analysis—and the burgeoning subfield of narrative economics—to suggest a reparative path forward for both men and women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Holocaust survivor Anna Langfus (1920–1966) left Poland for France in 1946, she broke all ties with her home country. French became her language of choice for the three novels she published between 1960 and 1965, and she never used Polish at home nor taught it to her only daughter. Yet, in a contribution to a volume on Chopin published a few months before her death, she had the famous composer cry out: 'I do not want to die in this country. [...] No, not here. But at home, in my home, the only home I ever owned, my parents' home. A home I shall never see again; a country I have abandoned.' Drawing on the work of Julia Kristeva (abjection) and Dominick LaCapra (empathic unsettlement) I explore representations of exile in Langfus's fiction in three respects: the incommunicability of the Shoah and the ensuing exilic condition of the Holocaust survivor (exile from others); the fragmentation/dislocation of the narrator's body as expression of the survivor's existential anguish (exile from self); the fleeting solace offered by creative fiction and the connection established with readers (suspension of exile). Throughout this discussion, I will be guided by the motif of the fog, which features strongly in Langfus's Chopin text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nurses working in forensic psychiatric settings face unique challenges in practice, where they take on a dual role of custody and caring. Patient resistance is widespread within these restrictive settings and can take many forms. Perhaps the most disturbing form of resistance entails a patient's weaponization of their bodily fluids, with nurses as their target. The tendency in assigning motive for this act is to relegate to the psychopathology of the patient. This paper will adopt a poststructuralist perspective to reexamine this phenomenon as an act of resistance through the lens of Kristeva's concept of abjection. Patients confined in these settings have little sense of control, and in resistance may resort to the only thing available: their bodily fluids. By weaponizing the abject, patients actively violate and permeate the physical and psychological boundaries of nurses—the very boundaries considered crucial to safe and professional forensic psychiatric nursing practice. By recognizing this phenomenon as an act of resistance to confinement and loss of control, nurses may reorient their approach to care in forensic psychiatric settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the layered nature of animality, maternity and abjection epitomised by Gulliver's frightening adventures in Brobdingnag. I focus specifically on the maternal force‐feeding that Gulliver is subjected to by the Brobdingnagian monkey, which he describes as 'the greatest Danger I ever faced in the Kingdom'. The monkey is killed following the episode, which temporarily restores Gulliver's stalwart sense of self. I contend that the monkey incident in Brobdingnag decentres Gulliver's sense of identity and demonstrates the violability of his body by the feminised animal, which ultimately destabilises his sense of masculinity and opens myriad queer potentialities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This essay examines parallels between the representation of garbage and the racialized production of the category of the human. In recent years, waste has become a ubiquitous metaphor for understanding the lives of the jobless poor, perceived as discarded by global capitalism and thereby rendered "disposable life." The essay questions the conflation of waste with abjection through an ethnographic analysis of a film and art project produced on a garbage dump in Rio de Janeiro. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neglected tropical diseases are defined operationally as diseases that prevail in "tropical" regions and are under-researched, under-funded, and under-treated compared with their disease burden. By analysing the adjectives "tropical" and "neglected," I expose and interrogate the discourses within which the term "neglected tropical disease" derives its meaning. First, I argue that the term "tropical" conjures the notion of "tropicality," a form of Othering which erroneously explains the disease-prevalence of "tropical" regions by reference to environmental determinism, rather than colonialism and neocolonialism. Second, I examine the way in which this Othering enables the abjection of tropical regions and their peoples, leading to neglect. I recommend that the term "neglected tropical diseases" be more carefully contextualised within health scholarship, education, and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates what people mean when they engage in the discourse of denigration. Building on existing literature on territorial stigmatisation that either focuses on macro‐scale uses and effects of territorial stigmatisation or micro‐scale ethnographic studies of effects, we develop a novel approach that captures the diverse voices that engage in the discourse of denigration by tracing the use of the word and hashtag “shithole” on the social media platform Twitter in order to examine who is engaged in the stigmatising discourse, the types of place that are stigmatised and the responses to stigmatised places. Using a robust data set, we highlight two key findings. First, the majority of tweets were aimed at places where the tweeter was not from, a form of othering consistent with how territories are stigmatised by those in positions of power such as policymakers, politicians and journalists. Second, we note that an important and gendered minority of tweets can be characterised by a “cry for help” and powerlessness, where the stigma is aimed at their own places. We offer an interpretive lens through which to understand and frame these minoritarian voices by engaging with theories of abjection that allow us to see how minoritarian voices relate to place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to determine whether fixed courses of judicial corporal punishment ( JCP) and non-abusive corporal punishment of children ( CPC) amount to torture. I assess the reasons that have been offered for distinguishing fixed courses of JCP from torture and argue that none is successful. I argue that non-consensual JCP that inflicts severe pain is appropriately classifiable as torture, but that JCP that inflicts mild pain and entirely consensual JCP are not torturous. I consider whether any of the reasons offered for distinguishing JCP from torture can distinguish non-abusive CPC from torture given certain important differences between CPC and JCP. I submit that none of these reasons is successful. I consider other possible reasons for distinguishing non-abusive CPC that inflicts severe pain from torture and argue that none is successful. I conclude that fixed courses of non-consensual JCP which inflict severe pain and non-abusive CPC that inflicts severe pain are correctly classifiable as torture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Girls' magazines act as important texts through which meanings of childhood, girlhood and womanhood are mediated and constructed. However, previous research has focused on either the conditions of work practices or cultural production of the magazine as a product. Separately in each context women or girls have been described as abject. The paper will argue that employees working on girls' magazines experienced a simultaneous double abjection: in the gendered working practices and as an outcome of the construction of girlhood they produced. Two studies of all female teams producing teenage and pre-teen magazines were used, including interviews and observations. Our approach engaged with the difficulty of examining abjectivity in working practices, as present but marginalized, silenced and othered. As a result of scrutinizing the gendered embodiment in these studies, the findings suggest there is a relation between the working practices and gendered cultural production, forming a process of abjection. This process was threefold: a marginalization of a particular gendered embodiment, the cracks or leaks where abjectivity became apparent and the silencing of those leaks. This study will be of value to scholars interested in gendered embodiment in workplaces, abjectivity and cultural production, noting the interrelation between these areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to detect Tennessee Williams's psychological development in his last successful playTheNight of the Iguana (1961) in comparison with his previous plays which pronounced his fragmented identity. A comparison between Tennessee Williams's Suddenly Last Summer (1958) and TheNight of the Iguana detects a sudden shift of the dramatist's mind in the application of symbols and images employed. A psychoanalytical assessment and comparison of symbols, images and literary devices applied in both plays will depict the dramatist's constitution of his tenuous "I" and reconstruction of his distorted identity. Unlike the horrifying images of God, cannibalism and melancholia resulting from abjection that imposed a certain Gothic atmosphere in Suddenly Last Summer, the images and settings in The Night of the Iguana resonate with comfort and leisure which resemble the pre-symbolic. The study therefore suggests that Williams's abundant use of natural symbols and images, particularly the God image in The Night of the Iguana presents the setting as the "chora" which Kristeva defines as the place where the infant's identity is mergedwith his/her mother before gaining an identity after the mirror stage and the learning of language whichmarks subsequent entry into the symbolic order. This analysis therefore helps to bring some clarity to the play, particularly in the light of prior criticism levelled against Williams for his excessive use of symbols and natural images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to detect Tennessee Williams's psychological development in his last successful play The Night of the Iguana (1961) in comparison with his previous plays which pronounced his fragmented identity. A comparison between Tennessee Williams's Suddenly Last Summer (1958) and The Night of the Iguana detects a sudden shift of the dramatist's mind in the application of symbols and images employed. A psychoanalytical assessment and comparison of symbols, images and literary devices applied in both plays will depict the dramatist's constitution of his tenuous “I” and reconstruction of his distorted identity. Unlike the horrifying images of God, cannibalism and melancholia resulting from abjection that imposed a certain Gothic atmosphere in Suddenly Last Summer, the images and settings in The Night of the Iguana resonate with comfort and leisure which resemble the pre‐symbolic. The study therefore suggests that Williams's abundant use of natural symbols and images, particularly the God image in The Night of the Iguana presents the setting as the “chora” which Kristeva defines as the place where the infant's identity is merged with his/her mother before gaining an identity after the mirror stage and the learning of language which marks subsequent entry into the symbolic order. This analysis therefore helps to bring some clarity to the play, particularly in the light of prior criticism levelled against Williams for his excessive use of symbols and natural images. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prominent assumptions about street homelessness and how it should be addressed originate primarily from middle class domiciled worldviews. This article draws on interviews with 58 street homeless people to develop a typology for explaining different forms of homelessness resulting from differences in class of origin. The concepts of social distance and abjection are used to illustrate how class politics manifests in street homelessness and in responses to this issue. Many of our homeless participants referred to two broad groupings of homeless people who display distinct experiences and cultures in their daily lives on the streets. Drifters are people who do not experience homelessness as a sharp disjuncture from their previously housed life. Street homelessness is a continuation of the hardships of their lower class backgrounds. Droppers are people who have 'fallen' on hard times and aspire to return to mainstream middle class lifeworlds. Differentiating between these two groups provides a space for defamiliarizing dominant understandings of, and current generic responses to, homelessness and foregrounds the need for reorienting services to better meet the needs of drifters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The female body is central to the performance art, poetry and blog site interventions of Guatemalan Regina José Galindo. While Galindo is best known for her performance work, this article compares the hereto overlooked, distinctive and often shocking representations of the female body across her multimedia outputs. We first consider the ways in which, in all three media, Galindo presents an 'excessive', carnivalised, grotesque and abject female body. Second, we analyse representations of the female body that has been subjected to violence at a private and public level. In so doing, we show how Galindo not only contests hegemonic visions of gender and (national) identity but also challenges the viewer/reader to engage with, rather than look away from, the violence to which women are subjected in patriarchal society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Yemen's Soqotra Archipelago, during the years immediately preceding and following its inscription in 2008 as a UNESCO World Heritage site-and at a time when 'Bedouinness' in much of the Arab world had been or was being elevated to a marketable heritage-Soqotran pastoralists spoke frequently of being Bedouin as a form of categorical abjection. Examining the work of these iterations, I argue that 'Bedouin abjection' is a form of dialogic critique of the 'global hierarchy of value' and an ironic assessment of the Soqotran pastoral present. I further assert that anthropologists must be attentive to the universal resonances of these abject articulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This reading of Gwyneth Lewis (born 1959) and Medbh McGuckian (born 1950) considers language and identity through the frame of Julia Kristeva’s ideas about foreignness, strangeness and abjection. For Lewis, the focus is the loss of Cymraeg (the Welsh language), while McGuckian’s key poems present lost languages and minor modes of speaking. The death of Cymraeg and Gaelige (the Irish language) is read through Kristevan theory, which helps to explore the consequent abject breakdown of selfhood. For both poets, the death of language is worked through European poetics, in which a metaphysical distance allows fresh comment on culture and identity. For Lewis, this dictates a dialogue with Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), while McGuckian gestures to the poetics of Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938). What emerges is ekstasis, a state that Kristeva describes as going beyond oneself, and ekstasis is represented by both poets through the figure of the angel. The appearance of the angel after the breakdown of language and identity represents possibilities in being exiled from a stable sense of self, which in itself reflects the potential of minor or marginal cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standard ethnohistorical accounts of colonial encounters downplay violence and genocide in the interest of holistic ethnographic accounts. In particular, "upstreaming" is a technique that attempts to sublimate violence into interpretations of ethnological understanding. An argument is made for "ethnohistorical surrealism" as a methodology for preserving the ruptures of colonial contact. The principle of incommensurability is an important driver for the transformation of contact zone exchange systems into structures of violence. Drawing on Bataille's reading of the potlatch, exchange systems based on unreturnable gifts produce abjection in the recipient, which results in cycles of violence and ultimately subjection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opportunities for migrants in Britain have become increasingly differentiated by hardened legal barriers, restricted access to asylum and filtering by selected skills. This article explores the effects of this differentiation on diaspora formation, social mobility and class identities. It takes the case of one of the UK's largest new African migrant groups – black Zimbabweans – who mostly come from middle class/elite backgrounds, but who have ended up in unskilled and informal work, as well as securing professional posts in Britain. The article asks whether, and in what sense it might be useful to talk of the polarised opportunities created by legal status in terms of emerging class differences and challenges to class identities. It dwells on the subjective experience of those in irregular legal circumstances, whose loss of status in Britain has been particularly acute, drawing on theoretical debates on abjection and dehumanised ‘bare life’ that speak directly to the popular discourses and language in which those doing menial work and lacking papers spoke about their experiences and place in Britain. As some have, however, maintained their class position both at home and in intergenerational terms, the article highlights the transnational calculations that continue to render even illegal unskilled work in the UK attractive, and underlines the importance of discussing abjection in terms of the relations of power and processes that create legal spaces of exclusion rather than as a putative underclass. Notwithstanding such calculations, the article highlights the importance of legal status and inequality within migrant groups in shaping the dynamics of new diaspora communities in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes the case that discourse analytic approaches in social psychology are not adequate to the task of apprehending racism in its bodily, affective and pre-symbolic dimensions. We are hence faced with a dilemma: if discursive psychology is inadequate when it comes to theorizing ‘pre-discursive’ forms of racism, then any attempts to develop an anti-racist strategy from such a basis will presumably exhibit the same limitations. Suggesting a rapprochement of discursive and psychoanalytic modes of analysis, I argue that Kristeva's theory of abjection provides a means of understanding racism as both historically/socially constructed and as existing at powerfully embodied, visceral and subliminal dimensions of subjectivity. Kristeva's theory of abjection provides us with an account of a ‘pre-discursive’ (that is, a bodily, affective, pre-symbolic) racism, a form of racism that ‘comes before words’, and that is routed through the logics of the body and its anxieties of distinction, separation and survival. This theory enables us, moreover, to join together the expulsive reactions of a racism of the body to both the personal racism of the ego and the broader discursive racisms of the prevailing social order. Moreover, it directs our attention to the fact that discourses of racism are always locked into a relationship with ‘pre-discursive’ processes which condition and augment every discursive action, which escape the codifications of discourse and which drive the urgency of its attempts at containment. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent events have underlined in the most tragic and dramatic way the need for depth psychology to turn its attention to the psychology of terror. The present paper attempts to distinguish between the psychological modes of horror and terror and explores the different theoretical approaches of Burke, Freud, Kristeva and Jung to this problem in order to cast light on the individual and collective functions that horror and terror play. While all these authors stress that terror and horror play a role in structuring the sense of identity and in strengthening community bonds, Freud and Kristeva believe that the experience of horror works to increase the exclusion of otherness through mechanisms of repression or foreclosure while Burke and Jung see in the encounter with the Negative Sublime or with the Shadow the possibility of widening the boundaries of ego consciousness and of integration of 'otherness'. The paper then uses the analysis of two horror movies and of a particular socio-cultural context to illustrate these different functions of horror and terror and to delineate possible solutions to the problems facing society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MCCABE JL and HOLMES D. Nursing Inquiry 2011; : 77-83 Psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva defines the theoretical concept of abjection as an unconscious defence mechanism used to protect the self against threats to one's subjectivity. Kristeva suggests that the first instance of abjection in an individual's life occurs when the child abjects the mother. However, the instance of abjection addressed within this paper is the reverse of this: the abjection of the child, with a disability, by the parent, and more broadly society. Using the contemporary example of prenatal testing, the authors explore how parents of children with disabilities may be influenced in abjecting the child. The implications of abjection of the child are then used to explore normalization, routinization of care and the development of standardized care practices within health-care. Prenatal screening practices and standardized care permeate medical obstetric care and social discourses regarding pregnancy and childbirth, thereby affecting not only healthcare professionals but also parents in their position as consumers of health-care. In a time when the focus of health-care is increasingly placed on disease prevention and broader medical and social discourses glorify normalcy and consistency, the unconscious abjection of those that do not fit within these standards must be identified and addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]