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The use of clothing in art can serve as a powerful metaphor for the body. Bodies, when depicted with impurities resulting from violence, can evoke feelings of disgust and awareness in the audience. This article examines the works of Doris Salcedo, Christian Boltanski, and Anselm Kiefer, exploring how they utilize "clothing" as a representation of "bodies" to critique "violence."These artists employ clothing as a symbolic tool to represent violence in their works. By analyzing the diverse ways in which they utilize clothing, this article seeks to answer the following question: How can Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection be applied to analyze the works of Salcedo, Boltanski, and Kiefer, which utilize clothing as a tool for critiquing violence and representing loss, death, and violence? In the works of these artists, clothing serves as a metaphor for lost bodies. The abject theory, rooted in the rebellion of borders and systems and deeply connected to the visceral body, provides a compelling framework for understanding this representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Research in Contemporary World Literature is the property of University of Tehran and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Research in Contemporary World Literature is the property of University of Tehran and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Research in Contemporary World Literature is the property of University of Tehran and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Exploring the intersection of Gothic Medicine and Graphic Medicine in Ian William's graphic novel, The Bad Doctor, this article discusses the ways in which gothic aesthetics, particularly representations of the abject encounter, contribute to an understanding of mental illness whilst also interrogating dominant paradigms within medical discourse. Further, this study suggests that the gothic aspects of comics as a medium contribute to the effectiveness of Gothic Medicine as a genre by offering insight into visual and verbal representations of the body. Detailed close readings indicate that Williams's work draws a parallel between the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder on an individual level and the hostility toward the Gothic that formed a cornerstone in the foundation of modern medicine as a discipline. [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]

Julia Kristeva’nın psikanalitik kuramında abjeksiyon, yalnızca bedenin bilinç ve bilinçdışı ile etkileşimlerini ortaya koymak ile kalmaz; aynı zamanda beden imgelemi üzerindeki patriarkal tahakkümü de ifşa eder. Kristeva, abjeksiyonu fenomenolojik bir süje olarak kullanır ve onun deneyimler üzerindeki etkilerini post-feminist bir perspektiften inceler. Ona göre patriarkal tahakküm altında beliren deneyimler, tıpkı bedenin “atıkları” gibi maddi varoluş içerisinde sönümlenen, bayağı ve ötekileştirilmiş devinimlerdir. Bu çalışmada Julia Kristeva’nın abjeksiyon kuramından yararlanılarak bedenin pre-modern ve modern düşünce tarihi içerisindeki ikincil konumuna eleştiri getirilmesi ve beden imgelemi üzerindeki patriarkal tahakkümün yapıbozumuna uğratılması amaçlanmıştır. Bunun için çalışmanın ilk bölümünde bedenin Antikiteden modern sosyal kurama kadarki yolculuğu kronolojik bir perspektiften ele alınmış ve Immanuel Kant, Emile Durkheim gibi düşünürlere odaklanılarak tartışılmış; ikinci bölümünde psikanalistler Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler ve Jacques Lacan’ın öğretilerindeki beden ve psikoz ilişkisi açıklanmıştır. Üçüncü bölümde ise Kristeva’nın abjeksiyon kuramı açıklanmış, abjeksiyonun patriarkal inşası incelenmiştir. Çalışma ile bedeni patriarkal abjeksiyon içerisinden kurtarmanın feminist literatür yönünden geçerliliğini koruyan bir gereklilik olduğu sonucuna varılmıştır.

This article details the deconstruction of social identity in Mark Gevisser's memoir Lost and Found in Johannesburg. It does so by emphasising how the city's design reflects racial and sexual segregation through the construction of borders and boundaries that are nonetheless nebulous and artificial. In Gevisser's memoir, his recollections are interspersed with the narratives of other marginalised individuals and groups. I employ Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection to understand how systems of exclusion function not only to exclude, but paradoxically, how they allow spaces of inclusion. I argue that the apartheid city can be read as a social body that can be analysed in a similar manner to how the individual subject distinguishes itself from others. The social body therefore creates subjective boundaries between racialised and sexualised others to maintain its sense of autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Simone de Beauvoir Studies is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Alternative Politics / Alternatif Politika is the property of Alternatif Politika and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Yedi is the property of YEDI (Dokuz Eylul Universitesi Guzel Sanatlar Fakultesi Yayini) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Lebanese Civil War, stretching over two decades of Lebanon's history, features prominently in any discussion of Rabih Alameddine's An Unnecessary Woman (2014), a novel fashioned according to the pent-up frustrations of a post-trauma period. Alameddine's novel manifests traumatic signposts of the civil war, which make it indelibly situational, and accordingly latches onto complex psychological issues. It is branded with the mark of "abject," which besots its pages, a phenomenon that threatens identity beyond measure, triggering even an existentialist entropy. In making an effort to (persistently) "describe" this complex phenomenon beyond ken, the novel enmeshes in a baroque and a quite wordy style that tells of an arduous quest on the author's (and characters') part to find the "right" word for "abject." Drawing mainly on Sigmund Freud's essay "The Uncanny" and Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror, this article proposes to skirt the psychological archaeology of "abject" in An Unnecessary Woman. It argues that the Lebanese Civil War is not the originator of the characters' feeling of abjection in the novel. Rather, it contends that this feeling, already inherent in the human being and thus universal, is activated by abject threats, such as, in this premise, the civil war, its suspect entourage, and aging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a psychoanalytic literary study of the online performance Domestic Tension (2007) by the Iraqi-American artist Wafaa Bilal. Fundamentally built on the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection is well suited to be the critical tool to analyse the online performance Domestic Tension. This paper questions the performance as a manifestation of abjection that espouses Bilal's anti-Iraq War stance, by exposing the killing of thousands of Iraqis by the US drones. Furthermore, it investigates how the Brechtian theatrical techniques are used to restrain the cathartic experience of the viewers-cum-shooters, inviting them to 'disavow' Bilal's body, abstain from any cannibalistic desires, and finally to think of the consequences of the US invasion of Iraq. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El presente trabajo estudia el proceso de archivamiento de lo cubano en dos cuentos de Virgilio Piñera: "El álbum" (1944) y "La cara" (1956), publicados en su colección Cuentos fríos (1956) en Buenos Aires. Aunque la crítica frecuentemente asume que la literatura de Virgilio Piñera evade temas políticos y sociales, demostraremos, en estos dos cuentos, cómo Piñera demuestra su interés por abordar lo que ha sido expulsado de la idea prevalente de lo cubano, aquello que ha sido pasado por alto. Estudiamos el método literario de acercamiento a la realidad señalado por Piñera en "El álbum" y "La cara," valiéndonos de la idea de archivo desarrollada por Jacques Derrida y de lo abyecto por Julia Kristeva. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores representations of witchcraft in relation to Julia Kristeva's 1980 essay Powers of Horror. It begins by investigating the genesis of Dario Argento and Daria Nicolodi's depiction of witchcraft in their 1977 horror film Suspiria, drawing on historical studies of witchcraft by Ronald Hutton and Marion Gibson. In particular, it examines the characterization of the witches' coven as an all-female, all-powerful death cult – before proposing that Kristeva's essay on the abject can be seen to explain this specific conceptualization, in line with Barbara Creed's analysis of how horror film has inherited the role of 'purifying' the abject from religious ritual. The second half of this article then focuses on David Kajganich and Luca Guadagnino's 2018 remake of Suspiria, reflecting on how the later film can be seen to attempt to redeem the association between witchcraft and abjectness. In doing so, this article reflects on how the attempt to rescue the witch while maintaining an association with the abject is contiguous with other contemporary depictions of witchcraft. It is proposed that such efforts amount to a Foucauldian attempt at a 'reverse discourse' celebrating the subversive potential of an initially derogatory identity formation – but that Kristeva's writing points to the limitations of appropriating the abject in this way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article teases out elective affinities between Julia Kristeva's theorization of the abject and certain (Afro-)Caribbean writers' figurations of racialized alterity and violence in the (post)colony. It argues that whereas Kristeva relies on the tropes of refuse and the corpse to classify the volatile experience she calls abjection, Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant and others invoke tropes of bareness and monstrosity (i.e. zombies, cannibals) to characterize and denounce racialized violence. It argues that whereas Kristeva relies on an understanding of the abject as intimately tethered to the pre-Oedipal, writers such as Michelle Cliff and Edwidge Danticat offer us exemplary works that tend to the abject and semiotic praxis by imaginatively drawing on the pre-colonial, not least its valuations of matrilineal power and wisdom. The article registers these affinities and speculates on what the differences bespeak about violence vis-à-vis the (M)other and blackness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of American Studies of Turkey (JAST) is the property of Journal of American Studies of Turkey (JAST) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article explores the desire for self-expression that Zelda Fitzgerald’s novel Save Me the Waltz represents by drawing a parallel between the heroine’s decision to take up ballet dancing and the author’s own attempt to write a book that would be her own and not mere autobiographical material from a renowned artist’s wife. The body looms large in such an attempt as it marks a border between self and other, and Alabama Beggs Knight’s desire to control and shape her body is a metaphor for control over her own life. Likewise, Zelda Fitzgerald’s dense and highly metaphorical style, which has often been criticized as excessively verbose and labored and which can make for difficult reading, is an attempt to work on the body of her text, giving the resisting material of language a shape and rhythm of her own. This is a long and difficult process that confronts the artist, ballet dancer, or writer, with the ever-threatening dissolution of self and other, and the subsequent collapse of meaning. Relying on Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject, this article shows how the body’s turn from object to abject is a necessary and difficult step toward creation and marks Alabama’s and Zelda Fitzgerald’s progressive inscriptions as subjects acknowledging “lack” as constitutive of language and self. However, conveying this lack and negotiating the fraught relationship between self and other remains a demanding and ongoing challenge and may account for the sometimes missed encounter of this very personal book with its readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The land/woman metaphor has always been an effective tool to define Ireland and Irish nationalists aligned their feminized land with patriarchal discourse and created the iconic Mother Ireland in the image of the Virgin Mary. Known for his anti- Revivalist arguments, James Joyce reveals that the cult of Mother Ireland must be demolished to reach the essence of Irish identity hidden in the "abject" maternal body. Therefore, in his struggle against colonialism, Joyce turns his attention to women, believing that Irishness starts with the exploration of a woman's body. Using Kristeva's abjection theory to reinterpret Joyce's position as the "abject" child of Irish literature, this paper aims to analyze the writer's prominent women characters in Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and in Ulysses in parallel to his search for an identity as an Irish writer and his anti-colonial struggle against patriarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As public administration continues to explore geographic information systems (GIS), the field needs to take critical GIS seriously. Herein, I demonstrate that critical GIS can help public administration scholars and practitioners counter-map sites of oppression and exclusion, which has important implications for a socially just administrative state. This study begins with a theoretical discussion about the role of exclusion and oppression in the administrative state by way of Agamben's (1998; 2004) state of exception, Kristeva's (1982) abjection, and Quijano's (1992; 2000) coloniality of power thesis. Thereafter, I look at exclusion and oppression in praxis, followed by a case study that examines the shooting of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, on the evening of February 26, 2012. Here, counter-maps show a stark juxtaposition of concentrated affluence and disadvantage in Sanford; which points to a series of inequalities that quite possibly empowered George Zimmerman's decision to abject Trayvon Martin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standardized achievement testing of children began in the United States in the 1960s. Since then, the data produced from such tests has been extrapolated to measure schools, teachers, and principals. Today, testing and its corollaries consume much of the time and energy of teachers and students. Miriam Cohen’s (2006/1980) First Grade Takes a Test and Andrew Clements’ (2004) The Report Card invite young readers to question the purposes and validity of the tests they are required to take. Both authors clearly present the more insidious aspects of testing and question the tests’ assumptions of normalcy, and each suggests the adults themselves are caught in the same web created by the agencies and institutions they serve. However, when read in the light of Kristeva’s (1982/1980) descriptions of the abject as that which is on the border of identity, Cohen’s and Clements’ stories go further, raising the specter of a disturbing scenario involving an underlying and diabolical institutional mindset—a mind behind the test—that, through the guise of testing, blurs borders of identity, collapses meaning and perceptions of what is normal, and contributes to the resulting abjection of all participants, especially children identified as geniuses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The art filmNaked Lunch(1991) may have marked a turn away from the horror genre for David Cronenberg, but it also features both monsters and monstrosity. Protagonist Bill Lee wanders passively through a surreal landscape populated with fantastical creatures feeding him orders that correspond to the impulses he does not recognize within himself. By Cronenberg’s own description, these monsters are projections, excusing and externalizing Lee’s internal, unacknowledged anxieties. Since these monsters are embodied outside himself, Lee never has to confront his internal conflicts as such. Engaging with writings on horror and monsters by Julia Kristeva, Noël Carroll, and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, this essay usesNaked Lunchto develop a Cronenbergian theory of monstrosity. Monsters objectify the abject, but in doing so evade the sources of abjection. Cronenberg, a filmmaker constantly exploring abjection and monstrosity, for the first time in his filmography articulates this problematic relationship between them explicitly inNaked Lunch. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The blood libel is usually known as the Medieval European legend about Jews killing Christians to consume their blood or otherwise use it in rituals. However, in this paper I explore more recent instances of the blood libel that have emerged in nationalist contexts. What I call the nationalist blood libel is more overtly politicized than its predecessors, as there is a relationship between the accusatory portrayals of groups signified as alien and what Arjun Appadurai in Fear of Small Numbers (2006) called an anxiety of incompletion inherent in the modern nation-state as a result of the political discourses of majority and minority. In this article I discuss specific instances of the nationalist blood libel in a Nazi publication and in a cartoon aired in 2010 by Hamas wherein the Jew is signified as an agent of abjection; of transgression and dismemberment. I also examine an example from contemporary Britain in which the Islamist has replaced the Jew in the narrative, as this subject is imagined as an existential threat to the British people and the nation. In reading these examples through Julia Kristevas theorization of abjection, I contend that the telling of the nationalist blood libel relates personal and communal fears about pollution and dissolution, and that this fear, though fundamentally threatening to subjectivity, nevertheless works to establish it. I therefore argue that this reveals the nationalist blood libel as a folk reification mechanism that allows the segmentation of friend/enemy camps and rationalizes anxieties along lines of protectionism, and thereby mobilizes affects into political and often violent action.

Philip Riddley's Mercury Fur portrays a dystopian world where violence has permeated and chaos prevails. This paper aims to argue that regulatory Law is subtly depicted as a necessary condition in this dystopic setting, where Law appears in the form of violence and the burst of the Real in Lacan's terms, and the military attack in the end terminates the existing system. This chaotic atmosphere which calls for the governmental intervention in the end is established through the burst of the Real, abjection, and the shift in subject positions. The structure of this dystopian world will be analyzed through the theories of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I explore the question of what, in the context of university teaching and in psychical terms, the appearance of my sweat might be a reminder of. With reference to Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, I argue that my sweat represents a threat to the unitary pedagogical self, as it also serves as a reminder of the condition of teaching as one of primal and primary dependence: that, as teachers and professors, we are never whole unto ourselves. Though my tendency to sweat profusely may be an unwelcome feature of my personal, genetic inheritance, I also argue that, in teaching, we each have our own unique breed of abject reminders that, if thought in relation to our own incompleteness, can serve as a prompt for the development of ethical relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applying Julia Kristeva's theories of abjection reveals both the development of the character of Heathcliff and his actions within Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff exhibits common attributes of abused children, which is exacerbated when the Earnshaw family treats him as a liminal 'Other'. As a result of his abjection, Heathcliff exhibits borderline personality traits. He abuses human beings and animals, and constantly rejects social laws. Longing for fulfilment and connection, Heathcliff becomes enmeshed with Catherine Earnshaw. Unable to separate himself from Catherine, despite her death, Heathcliff increasingly spends his time searching for signs of her absent presence in the natural world. Although he seems to realize his abject state and reject his carefully planned revenge at the end of his life, Heathcliff cannot move away from abjection. Instead, Emily Brontë creates a character who fails to construct a boundary between himself and the Other and exemplifies Kristeva's definition of abjection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the science fiction films "Terminator 2" and "Robocop." Particular focus is paid to the depiction of cyborgs in the two films. According to the author, both films highlight the distinctions between the human and synthetic components of cyborgs. Also addressed is the concept of post-humanism in relation to cyborgs, cyberspace and cyber-cultures.

This article uses a psychoanalytic framework to examine the troping of the body in Doris Lessing's The Grass is Singing. Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection is used to describe the attraction/ repulsion dialectic which characterizes not only Mary Turner's relationship with her ‘houseboy’, Moses, but which also accounts for the position both characters occupy as threats to the colonial ‘body politic’. The argument extends Kristeva's discussion of the maintenance of individual subjectivity through abjection to group identity in order to explain the importance of bodily metaphor to racist constructions. Ultimately, Lessing's deployment of a discourse of corporeal metaphor is presented as emphasizing the defensive paranoia of the closed ‘social body’ and thus as a powerful indictment of colonial ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ali Smith's Hotel World is the story of a fatal accident and its traumatic consequences. Hotel chambermaid Sara Wilby bets a co-worker that she can stuff herself into the hotel's dumbwaiter. She wins the bet, but the elevator cable breaks, the dumbwaiter drops, and Sara crashes inside it. The present essay will discuss the narrative consequences of Sara Wilby's death through the critical theory of trauma, particularly in its repercussions upon discourse. Special emphasis will be placed on the idea that trauma is not just a crisis in the memory of the traumatized subject but a crisis in representation and narration. The main object of study of the essay will be trauma's disturbance of discourse through gaps and its points of contact with the abject. Ali Smith proposes the 'purification' of the abject through the Logos, one of the ways in which trauma might be dealt with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Rudyard Kipling's 'The City of Dreadful Night' we see a narrator on the very border of 'I', precarious, brittle and in disarray. It is a state of utter disunity where identity, according to Julia Kristeva, 'do[es] not exist or only barely so - double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject'. Abjection expels its brutal ambiguity and forces the subject to acknowledge its fragile grip on its own identity. Straddling the border between Romanticism's crumbling rhetoric and what would become the more introspective art of Modernism, Kipling's story, captures with remarkable clarity a nihilistic vision of a teeming metropolis. It is a world of horrifying contradictions with his narrator balanced precariously above it all, threatened at any moment to become engulfed by the uncanny pathology of his paradoxical states of subjectivity. The text moves between places, meanings and signifiers that are skewed and buckled; nacreous bones merge with the blanched, cadaverous skin of a leper, sleepers are indistinguishable from corpses, phantoms slip silently through the narrative, gusts of wind are brought to life, predatory creatures are anthropomorphised and breathing the stagnant air threatens suffocation. This chapter will explore, from a Kristevan perspective, Kipling's portrayal of this abjected, nightmare world of mutability, chaos and fragmentation where death is the 'border that has encroached upon everything'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hey Nostradamus! (2003) is in many ways a rewriting of Girlfriend in a Coma, published in 1998. The change in ideological tack these novels display is pivoted around two high-profile North American cultural traumas which took place between their writing: the Columbine High School massacre of 20 April 1999 and the terror attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. of 11 September 2001. In Girlfriend in a Coma, a group of listless bourgeois characters is exhorted by a variety of mystical means - prescient visions, ghostly visitations and the end of the world - to snap out of their self-absorbed and directionless lives and effect a radical spiritual-political revolution. The solution to the cultural ennui from which they suffer is figured primarily in evangelical Christian terms of witnessing and testifying, of shouting out the unfashionable truth to a self-absorbed, secular world which has lost all sense of the sacred, of social cohesion or political agency. In Hey Nostradamus!, written in the shadow of the trauma of Columbine and 9/11, Coupland withdraws his macropolitical revolutionary experiment in favour of interpersonal micropolitics. With specific focus on Julia Kristeva's concepts of abjection and the chora, this essay shows how Coupland rewrites the depersonalized and fetishized Columbine High School massacre, and charts his retreat from macropolitical fervour to repersonalization in the face of real trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the heterosexual adolescent male's physical, psychological, and behavioral metamorphoses that is shown in cinema outside the horror genre. It presents film texts such "Oh, the rivers of sperm I spilled dreaming of her thighs!" from French-Canadian writer director Denys Arcand's Les Invasions barbares (2003) being essential to the discussion. It provides a comparison between "Les Invasions" and the Mexican production "Amores perros (2000)." It states that the continued denial of the possibilities of alternative definitions of masculinity in cinema will endlessly regenerate a narrow and incomplete map of gender geography where adolescent masculinity is inextricably tied to a monstrous form.

This article argues that CSI: Miami disseminates two versions of politics, one of which replicates the conservative suppression of political debate in America post 9/11, and the other being founded in an understanding of the body as transgressive site of political activism. This second version of politics emerges out of Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection as a confusion of borders, which unsettles equally the discreteness of identity and the sense of order that subtends conservative politics. CSI: Miami can be multiply interrogated employing Kristeva's theory because the city it portrays, as well as the bodies inhabiting it, are both natured by an abject problematisation of borders. This paper explores the specifics of the portrayal of bodies in CSI: Miami, to suggest that abjection operates at the level both of discrete bodies and of the social domain of globalisation. In CSI: Miami, the political body becomes the body politic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a close reading of Geraldine McCaughrean’s award-winning novel, The White Darkness. It argues that this is a key text in the increasing debate about ‘crossover’ literature. Whereas, traditionally, adolescent books were seen to offer compensatory fantasies to the adolescent reader, McCaughrean’s text goes beyond this, exploring adolescence in deeper terms: not simply as an age-defined period but as a time when the traditional coordinates of the self are thrown into crisis, or become destabilized (as an ‘open psychic structure’, as Kristeva puts it). Adopting such a psychoanalytical approach, it is argued, we can begin to understand this book’s appeal (and others like it) to adolescent and adult alike; that is, it stages a shift from an imaginary identification with a stable self to a more realistic, albeit less secure recognition of the flimsiness of identity. The white wastes of Antarctica provide the perfect backdrop for this confrontation with the ungraspable Real. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This presentation emerges from our experiences teaching an online, asynchronous children's literature graduate course. Across its six-year history, teacher-participants have responded variously to the graphic novel Skim. Recently, when confronted with an image in the novel depicting a kiss between a female high school student and her female teacher, some course members focused solely on the kiss, seeming to dismiss the text entirely. To think through this unprecedented occurrence, and to consider its philosophic and curricular constraints/ possibilities, we draw on the thinking of Julia Kristeva and those who interpret her work. Specifically, we are thinking about the role of discomfort in leading to Kristeva's abjection—or, a casting out of the perceived other—and Sonja Arndt's "dominant need to know" as possibly protecting against dwelling within the uncertain chaos of discomfort and the resulting redefinition of self. This presentation contributes to the ongoing conversation around pedagogies of discomfort. We also consider the distinct temporal experience of reading a graphic novel and suggest that the unique temporality of both the assigned reading and teacher-participants' lives may encourage/discourage dwelling in discomfort. In closing, we discuss possible curricular and pedagogic shifts we might make to open spaces for dwelling with/in discomfort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]