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Feminist analyses of postfeminism too often abject femininity, rendering spectacular femininity as a masquerade that endears women to heterosexual men. Moving into the era of popular feminism, feminist analyses have yet to renegotiate this abjection of femininity, often eclipsing the potential for resistance in favor of highlighting the pernicious effects of capitalism. Analyzing vignettes from The Bold Type (2017–2021), this research draws on femme theory to map an analytical framework that reinterprets spectacular femininity, developing strategies for critical analyses that can recognize fem(me)inine resistance within a landscape that commodifies femininity and feminism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Placing myself as a rejected doctoral student (2010–2022), this paper examines the emergent nature of identity formation across time and space. While presenting a layered account of my lived experience in seeking pathways of pursuing doctoral study, each reading experience leads me to produce my identity(ies) and situated knowledge(s) as an outsider. To illustrate the complexity of one's lived experience, I choose to present my work in an unconventional format of scholarship. By giving voice to an academic outsider, this paper adds to the nascent literature on the non-linear becomingness of academic identity. Further, this form of scholarship advocates for writing -differently as a means to empower minorities to articulate their diverse epistemology. The implication of writing up this public letter helps me mitigate feelings of vulnerability and rebuild self-confidence, creating a space of being and its potential to reconstitute the self in their becomingness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Latin American & Caribbean Studies (Routledge) is the property of Routledge 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.)

By packaging the television show Yellowjackets as a gender-flipped Lord of the Flies meant to reveal that girls can be just as violent and predatory as boys, the Showtime series successfully tapped into the market of popular feminism. Inspired by Sayak Valencia’s discussion of “gore capitalism” in hypermasculine popular culture, this article presents a close reading of Yellowjackets in order to problematize popular feminism’s cannibalization of heteropatriarchal iterations of death and gore. A seemingly edgy and purportedly subversive stand-in for girl power, I contend that “gore power” or “gore empowerment” rhetoric incoherently portrays women’s adoption of hegemonically masculine traits as both a symbol of empowerment and a warning sign of moral decay. Transposing abject hegemony in a manner that further degrades women as unscrupulous and maladjusted monsters, such programming bolsters a necro-neoliberal regime in which women’s achieved liberation is manifested by a gender-equal—but racially hierarchized—hunger for domination, blood, and death. By interrogating the televisual coupling of indiscriminate violence with women’s empowerment, this essay provides further analysis of white feminism’s necropolitical commitments as they function rhetorically to undermine the political projects of equity, women’s leadership, antiviolence, and racial justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provoking questions about morality and civility, survival narratives which feature young adults often offer new visions of social organisation by positing extreme scenarios of isolation and breakdown. In Showtime’s Yellowjackets, the survivor-protagonists are framed as monstrous, but also as disruptive “others” with the potential to unravel regulatory systems. By resisting gendered mythologies, the survivor-protagonists are associated with varying expressions of autonomy and agency, and an amplified sense of difference and abjection. In considering the subversive potential of an all-female Lord of the Flies, this paper explores how the central characters of Yellowjackets gain power by accessing and enacting forms of “otherness” in violent and radical ways. It argues that by rejecting the norms used to relegate women to the margins, the Yellowjackets profoundly unsettle, even corrupt, traditional conceptions of femininity and idealised visions of girlhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As evidence of vitality, pain exists as a tool that unravels the mysteries of the traces and repressed stories hiddenin the memory of societies. The counterpart of pain in life can be found in the expression of emotions belonging to the life of the society from which it originates, in rituals and in the complex texture of everyday language. When the image of pain in art is considered in relation to its counterpart in life, we come across codes that reveal our identity. When the real-life counterpart of the image of pain in art isconsidered and its connections with pain are examined, we come across codes that reveal our identity. But here, palliative as a concept refers to the exact opposite situation in society's relationship with pain. Palliative societyis a contended society that is as far removed from pain as possible in texture and that desires and enforces life. This society of desires is a society based on artificiality, which presents the positivity in life excessively andimposes consumerism, desire, enthusiasm and need as the most essential of life, and aims to "be as happy as itcan". However, today, artists have produced images that express and convey that societies experience pain moredeeply, focusing on the suffering of societiesor people, in contrast to this positivity. Artists who work on thebody have even attempted to reveal the gravity and tragic nature of this tension through direct intervention on thebody. In a palliative approach, the image of pain in art can be described as an image of excessive interpretations, a negative narrative with exaggerated expressions, and an array of nauseating expressions that affect all thesenses. In this sense, the study reveals the similarities and differences between images of pain, violence, nausea, disgust in art and the image of pain in a palliative society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global drug policy is currently dominated by great enthusiasm about human rights, including the idea that rights can generate less punitive approaches to drugs. But if human rights were an effective framework for the prevention of punitive approaches towards drugs, why haven't they prevented them previously? One possibility is that rights are less reliable for those society considers 'less than human'. In Western liberal contexts that valorise voluntarity, rationality, authenticity, and order, people who use drugs figure as compulsive, irrational, duplicitous and chaotic. Rights can reproduce these logics of abjection, including through the repetition of ideas about drugs and proper ways of being. A body of critical drug scholarship seeks to intervene in these constructions. This work mobilises 'habit' as an otherwise to 'addiction' and argues that habit is the foundation of realities. Habits, and thus realities, can be changed. This paper draws on these approaches to explore whether insights from critical drug scholarship can help to generate something after rights, made possible by new habits and modes of connection. To make this argument, we consider habits as a site of both repetition and rupture. We ask whether habits can help us rethink or disrupt rights, and the 'human' therein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Few female authors have managed to bring about a gynocritical habitus of recognition like that of Jasmina Musabegović. A woman as a scholar, writer, and interpreter – both in the context of literary criticism and the literary text itself – would be just some of the key determinants of this author's creative biography. The experience of meticulous scholarly effort, poetic-essayistic feminine writing, the skill of deconstructing patriarchal codes, and the profiling and reconstruction of female narrative identities are preoccupations that lead Musabegović towards anachronisms. In her literary-critical work, essayistic oeuvre, in novels – from the first Snopis to Žene. Glasovi – identities, both authorial and protagonistic, inscribe themselves through certain topoi (typically female cognitive intimate spaces) and atopoi (dreams, the body's aporia, arts, phantasmagoria), reaching textual, and through it, an existential anachronism. Under the hypothesis that women's anachronisms occur precisely through and between topoi and atopoi, the work examines how they manifest and what they reflect. The research leads to the conclusion that the motifs of recognition range from sensual feminine to geographical and historical, woven into their associations subject to previous experiences.

While Eros has a central philosophical function in the dialogues of Plato, it all but disappears as a philosophical term in the thought of Aristotle, and is replaced by the more rational and reciprocal relation of friendship, φιλία. This essay asks what becomes of Eros in Aristotle's thinking, whether as deity, natural or cosmic force, or mode of human relation. Drawing on the ancient epithet of Eros, Ἔρως λυσιµελής , unbinder of limbs, Aristotle's usages of both ἔρως and λύσις (loosening, unbinding), respectively are traced in their ambivalence for his fundamentally organismic philosophy, insofar as they disturb the organism's ontological integrity. With the assistance of Kristeva's notion of the abject, it is argued that while Aristotle's overt stance is a polemic against eros, his principal metaphysical innovations – the recasting of ἀρχή as divine τέλος , and the separation of material and moving causes – are solutions (λύσεις) to aporias that may involve a traversal of the sublime that is also irreducibly corporeal and erotic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within urban sociology, the unpredictability of poor, urbanized space explains why black youth are "present oriented" and why they treat orientations to the future as futile. But where urban sociology suspends black youth in time and space, this research aims to de-arrest them from the "ethnographic present." Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with thirty youth, I make the case that within "present orientations" there is prescience. This paper is based on over one year of fieldwork at Run-a-Way – a center for youth in Minneapolis, Minnesota. With limited life chances and limited chances at life, youth at Run-a-Way saw the future as fugitive. Instead of being a paralyzing force keeping youth suspended in time, present orientations were marked by the production of nowness, in light of a prescient vision of what is to come. Because black youth chose not to entertain liberal futurities directed towards "rights" and "freedoms" associated with a post-raciality did not make them present oriented. It made them prepared. As prescience comes to serve as a more accurate signifier of black youth's relation to the future, we come to see why the "ethnographic present" and the interpellation of blackness through abjection are both unsustainable and obsolete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is there more powerful revenge narrative in contemporary popular culture than that of all-time über-nerd, Carrie White? For Carrie is a figure of abjection nonpareil, one who is, routinely, subjected to ongoing and intensifying humiliations. Given this treatment, it should come as no surprise when, finally, the tormented Carrie turns the tables, quite spectacularly, on her tormenters – and everyone else who gets in her way. A catastrophic state of affairs that Carrie so clearly 'enjoys', embodying what might be called revenge's jouissance. Utilising a perspective that is broadly psychoanalytic, this article will take up Carrie's jouissance of revenge, situating it in terms of three registers: phallic jouissance, juris-jouissance and feminine jouissance. All, with this end in sight: nothing less than the re-inscription of feminist connection and, with it, the possibility of forgiveness – instantiated in Carrie as victimised outlier and victimising jouisseuse – at the very centre of the Law's psychic subjectivity and social bond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Living is dying, an unscripted, unconscious rehearsal for the premiere of death—one show only for each individual serving the life sentence, cyclical reruns for collective humanity. Given our life as death rehearsal, we ought to hazard a 'death' gaze on life, a gaze at the world of the living, from the cavernous skull, framed by the twin sockets and the toothy grin. Utopian perhaps since death's point of view can only be imagined rather than acquired, this is, however, no different from any other perspective in fiction or scholarship. Wondering how to speak beyond the last words, this essay soon realizes that moments of silence between words have already rendered it as much an essay of words as a wordless essay. As words wrest themselves from the void, they often wind up as mere parenthesis for it. Culled from my scribbles during days suspended between the dying and the dead, the two Books on the passing of my father and father-in-law contain entries reflecting my thoughts at the time. Some entries may sound unsavoury, but, dear reader, they have already been beautified for your eyes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates whether and how media texts that explicitly support migrants and their settlement in Greece may echo racist assumptions. Our main claim is that the texts examined here overrepresent a “tolerable” and “familiar Other”, in contrast to some “vague” and “threatening Others”, who are largely minimized (i.e. deprived of agency, face and name). They remain at the margins of visibility and are not tolerated, while their foreclosure and loss emerge as normal. The racist underpinnings of this process are deconstructed on the basis of two theoretical axes: (a) that discourses of tolerance may be permeated by a liquid fear of the Other and fail to recognize migrants beyond the racist stereotype of the “Other as a threat” and (b) that this convergence of tolerance and fear takes place implicitly and can be studied in terms of what is silenced in discoursal representation of tolerance. Our analysis will draw upon a conceptual framework for the study of the (non) representation of migrants, based on the notions of recognition and abjection, in combination with linguistic/semiotic tools proposed by van Leeuwen. [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]

"For I pray God for the ostriches of Salisbury Plain, the beavers of the Medway and silver fish of Thames" (Jubilate Agno , B153): species extinction in Christopher Smart's unique poem is the focal point of this essay. That the poem's ecstatic scope offers a leveling care for the nonhuman has been acknowledged, but here I argue that it speaks out of abjection: the poet is the supplicant, asking all Earth's creatures to advocate for him before God. Additionally, focusing particularly on the figure of the beaver, I highlight the medieval animal fable as a valid mode of understanding better our animal kin today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This article aims to explore how humans react to the concept of mortality and the disgust they feel toward the decaying bodies of polio-stricken people in Nemesis (2010) by Philip Roth. Design/Methodology/Approach: This paper delves into the breakdown of Bucky Cantor’s life by the advent of polio in Newark, in Roth’s (1933-2018) Nemesis (2010), with the theoretical underpinning of Julia Kristeva’s (b. 1941) abjection and by using qualitative method of research. Findings: Abjection is portrayed in Nemesis through Bucky’s deep sense of helplessness and disgust in the time of the unremitting polio epidemic, adding to his deep fear of contamination and loss of control of the environment and even his own body. Throughout the novel, the author has emphasized the longsuffering effects of polio on the human body and mind, causing disgust, and trauma. Implications/Originality/Value: The article fills the gap by accentuating the long-term repercussions of polio and how it can leave victims both physically and emotionally crippled which has not been researched before with the framework of abjection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Annals of Philosophy / Roczniki Filozoficzne is the property of John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Faculty of Philosophy 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 paper examines the work of three photographers addressing the experiences of migrants awaiting decisions upon, or denied residency applications by the UK government. While Sam Ivin's Lingering Ghosts portraits convey the emotional and embodied impacts upon migrants awaiting notification of asylum requests, Melanie Friend's images of Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs) investigate the spaces of exclusion and detention within the UK border control system. The paper concludes by examining Yetunde Adebiyi's images of protests outside Yarl's Wood IRC, Bedford and alternative communities for "non-legal" migrants in Liverpool. These images are put in the context of a process of "social abjection" , whereby migrants have been increasingly marginalised through negative media and government policy, ultimately diminishing or denying citizenship to certain groups within society. This raises issues of mobility justice , in that individuals' experience of mobility is in sharp contrast to that of UK citizens and impacted by multi-scalar entanglements of other (im)mobilities. Individuals' bodily and spatial experience of, and agency over (im)mobility is related to their visibility, and agency over being visible. By exposing the relative experiences of mobility and visibility the photographs provide a potential site of advocacy for mobility justice but can also draw attention to the unequal experiences of citizenship of subject, photographer and viewer. By suggesting that photographs constitute and engender a social relationship between these parties, the paper proposes that photographic projects might offer a potential "civil contract" between those with very different experiences of mobility, visibility and citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that Anthony Trollope introduces a framework of character growth and decay, evinced through organic metaphors of ripening and rotting, to distinguish good and bad characters in The Small House at Allington and The Last Chronicle of Barset. By comparing a developing protagonist with a mature one who enters a phase of decline, we see how Trollope's commitment to nuanced characterisation is disrupted by his didactic aim of designating, and then torturing, patently bad figures. An analysis of the psychologies and aesthetics of character, framed around Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, shows how Trollope figures two subtly paralleled protagonists as opposites, establishing one as a palatable figure and the other as a nauseating one. The isolation of a rotten character serves a dual purpose: Trollope teaches his moral lessons by subjecting the character to physical, psychological, and structural decay, while narrative progression, culminating in the imperative happy ending, is structured around the abjection of the bad object. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the challenges of writing about an emotional othering of disabled people – between abjection and fetishization. These challenges can firstly be characterized as conceptual challenges. To date, theory-building in Disability Studies about emotional reactions to disability has mainly relied on disabled scholars’ ruminations on an emotional foundation for the discriminatory behaviour they experience. Further challenges arise within the ethical realm. When writing about an emotional othering, one risks reproducing the underlying violence. To navigate these challenges, I locate emotional reactions to disability in a social imaginary, which I further characterize as dis/ableist in the structural sense. After all, alleged reactions to disability reveal less about disabled people (as subjects or a collective) than about the respective socio-cultural context in which these reactions are acquired.

In her essay Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva investigates the concept of abjection. Essentially, the term means "the state of being cast off" and according to Kristeva it is a feeling of disgust, filth and humiliation, things we tend to reject for becoming subjects and protecting identities. But as I will argue here, by rejecting athletes who dissolve the culturally strict boundaries in sports, the sports organizations become abjects themselves, and consequently evade moral responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay considers heterogeneous Black temporalities in West Papua, Indonesia's largest urban region. Here, "Papuan time" is an extension beyond the dilemmas of being human or not. This is the possibility of being a human that has not experienced irremediable loss or a future foreclosed. But rather an entity that endures an after-life beyond what anyone might know it; a life situated in the middle of freedom and abjection. Such a life takes place in a city, Jayapura, that appears perpetually unsettled, something always "new." But in the repetition of such newness, it is a city that does not seem to go anywhere specific, that does not promise any sense of redemption. A city that never arrives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural America is shaped by a conflicted sense of the ordinary: a place where a pastoral imagination of the countryside overlaps with, obscures, and, at times, is obscured by images of addiction and economic abandonment. This essay explores how these two senses of the ordinary are interdependent: how the possibility of a postindustrial future depends on the abjection of a deindustrial present. The essay approaches this problem through the analytic lenses of three scenes along a road known as "heroin highway" in rural New York. Tracing the ambivalence of these ordinary scenes makes it possible to see people and places excluded from the American dream as essential products of its logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While complex women in contemporary television are, as Svenja Hohenstein and Katharina Thalmann contend, "no longer a niche phenomenon," the antiheroine continues to be defined by her relationship to motherhood, sexuality, and violence. This essay contrasts antiheroines Camille Preaker and Mare Sheehan from HBO's Sharp Objects and Mare of Easttown and argues that the antiheroine is premised on a disturbed mother-daughter dynamic that complexly manifests in two key opposing ways: in Sharp Objects, as the destruction of both self and other via a dynamic that is monstrous and devouring; and in Mare of Easttown, as a source of reconciliation and healing through a redemptive vision of the maternal. Both series confront the idea that the antiheroine's moral failings are a result of bad mothering, a familiar patriarchal trope that is simultaneously challenged and upheld in the narratives. Importantly, while they differ in their responses to essentialist patriarchal ideologies, Sharp Objects and Mare of Easttown position patriarchy as the true monster and suggest that control over the self can be gained through resisting the notions of the maternal taint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Estudos Feministas is the property of Revista Estudos Feministas 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.)

Ayfer Tunç, who started her writing career in newspapers and magazines in the 1980s, addresses the difficulties of being a woman in a selfish, opportunistic, hypocritical, greedy, deceitful, and objectifying society in her latest novel, Kuru Kız. The symbolic narrative of the novel allows for both thematic and psychoanalytic examination, which can be interpreted through concepts such as Freud's Oedipus Complex, Kristeva's "abjection," and Arendt's "banality of evil." The connections between these concepts and the novel Kuru Kız are interpreted with examples from the text. There are significant parallels between the harassment of the sister by her brother and the subsequent events, and the mythological story of Oedipus, indicating a psychoanalytic construct where "The Brother" character embodies traces of guilt and abjection. The behavior of the neighborhood residents exemplifies thoughtlessness and lack of judgment, in line with Arendt's concept of the banality of evil. The concepts of abjection and disgust serve as symbols of "resistance" against the evils portrayed by the other two concepts in Kuru Kız's inner monologues. Ultimately, the novel allocates a significant portion of its narrative to the psychological and sociological roots of the evils manifested or endured by Kuru Kız and those around her. The author suggests "taking action" as a way out for women through the message conveyed in the novel. Merely being aware is not sufficient for women to find peace in their lives; they must bravely implement the necessary changes. The novel Kuru Kız contains strong evidence to be considered an example of a female bildungsroman, as it encapsulates the coming-of-age story of a woman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades urban scholarship has witnessed a 'vertical' or 'volumetric' turn that has advanced understandings of the multi-modal power asymmetries cutting through and organising urban space. Yet, this volumetric scholarship often remains locked into binary critiques – of success/failure, inclusion/exclusion, luxury/abjection, dispossession/accumulation, arborescent/rhizomatic, horizontal/vertical. This special issue tinkers with the limitations of these (unwittingly) binary urban geometries and volumetrologies – material as well as metaphorical ones. By building the etymological opposition of 'the vertical' with 'the radical' into the title of the volume (via the Latin root radix, meaning 'root'), we seek to make the radical itself work with geometric and morphological associations. The papers in this special issue proffer diverse ethnographic, geographic and conceptual material for considering and theorising urban verticality in concert with rather than in opposition to its incumbent horizontalisms, diagonals, curls, zigzags and scattered planes. As we completed work on the special issue, the horrors of russia's full-scale invasion of Ukrainian territory played out before our eyes. Accordingly, we make use of the introduction to reflect upon the insight that the war in Ukraine brings to bear on the intersection between domains of the urban, the vertical and the radical in the fraught, tense, vicious, fragile – but resistant – urban worlds of today. In doing so, we seek not only to render more clearly visible the violent effects of power verticals on lives, worlds and cities, but also to find seeds of hope in emergent, insurgent forms of (vertical as well as horizontal, and neither vertical nor horizontal) resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a psychoanalytic reading of The Age of Orphans, the first installment of a trilogy by the Kurdish Iranian American novelist Laleh Khadivi. Drawing on Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection and using close reading, this study explores different forms of abjection in the novel, both thematically and textually. By doing so, the article attempts to uncover the meanings of the novel's fictional world, as well as its historical, political, and cultural context. Finally, this study, relying on Kristeva's theory of intertextuality, reveals how the writings of Khadivi, a second-generation immigrant geographically and generationally distant from her Kurdish roots, contribute to Kurdish literature and literary expressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios de Diseño y Comunicación is the property of Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios de Diseno y Comunicacion 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.)

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.)

Implementing Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, the present study attempts to demonstrate that the short fiction of Lydia Davis, contemporary American writer, is, first and foremost, about the fragility of identity and the precariousness of its borders. Using a descriptive-analytical approach and Kristeva's Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, as the main source in which she delineates her theory, this paper studies four of Lydia Davis's short stories in depth. Abjection is the process in which the subject casts aside anything foreign to the self, or the 'abject,' at an early stage, to safely procure a coherent I. By detecting and interpreting two of the abject's main manifestations, namely women and corpses, the current article will contend that Davis's characters/narrators are always already stuck in seemingly bottomless pits of identity crises, both inside and through their use of language. Analyzing Davis's "The Thirteenth Woman," "Suddenly Afraid," "Grammar Questions," and "Letter to a Funeral Parlor," this research tries to unravel the intricacies of maintaining shaken identities and endangered subjectivities at the face of unimaginable horror. Although discarded repeatedly by the characters in these stories, the abject never vanishes; it keeps haunting the periphery of selfhood and the solidarity of meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the value of the subjunctive mood as a template for understanding ethical action and the theological ontology that undergirds it. We do this by examining the use of a strange but very precisely used word in the writing of a theologian and minister and poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "silly." We do so in the name of exploring the value of contingency, accidentality and abjection to a general theory of ecological thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how neoliberal, gendered discourses of globalization position marginalized communities of women in popular culture, focusing on the ways in which the media of the global North produces the specific visuality of women of the global South. The representations of women of the global South, such as factory workers, mail/online-order brides, and domestic workers, point to the globalized mode of feminization of labor and the power asymmetry inherent in globalization. By analyzing the ways in which the female body of the global South embodies commodification, sexualization, and abjection, the paper points out that women's experiences are marginalized or erased in the neoliberal narrative of globalization. The (re)imagination of women of the global South in the media of the global North testifies to the historical legacy and discursive traditions of the colonial/imperial past and points to the reproduction and dissemination of sexualized and racialized imagery of otherness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Monique Wittig's Le Corps lesbien (1973), this article seeks to highlight its singularity by focusing on one of the book's significant aspects: the radical otherness of the lesbian body/subject within the heteropatriarchal system. Taking the theory of abjection as a framework, the article addresses some questions concerning the writing of the lesbian body as Wittig formulates it. KEYWORDS: Monique Wittig, Le Corps lesbien, abjection, lesbian body, lesbian language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper brings the Kristevan perspective on hierarchy into a conversation with norm research and accordingly borrows the concept of the abject, formulated to study the formation of the Self and Other and the following hierarchy between the two, to better understand the hierarchical implications of norm diffusion. The research, therefore, redefines norm diffusion as a practice of norm abjection due to the diffusion's hegemonic, subordinating, and transformative character, and doing so has enabled us to illustrate the implications for the norm research of the dual-performative function of the normative hierarchy: (i) formation of the boundary between the Self and the Other and (ii) maintaining it through active exclusion and normative expansion. The paper empirically studies the functioning of norm abjection in the example of the United Nations' (UN) harmful traditional practices (HTP) agenda, a fiercely condemnatory and decisively transformative normative project of the UN informed by its liberative development discourses and emancipatory gender regime. The paper, accordingly, examines the UN's abjecting of the harmful traditional practices as part of its efforts for diffusing progressive and emancipatory gender norms to the localities in the underdeveloped world to cast out the local vicious, wicked, primitive, and not-so- normative practices and rather implant the true, moral, superior , and universal norms. Our findings contribute to the unveiling of the dual-performative hierarchy the norm diffusion generates and of the colonial subject position the UN maintains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the relationship between democracy and the unconscious. It does so by understanding democracy through the repressed desire for shared power by a collective actor that has episodically realized itself, in ways that haunt political languages, practices, and aspirations. Democratic flourishing rests upon erotic practices through which the demos transgressively transforms politics by embracing what we refer to as democratic narcissism. Democratic decline and impasse are symptomatic of repressed desires for power that have required the people's abjection rather than coalescing into a self-affirming narcissism of the demos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The war in Syria has been communicated to global audiences through images of dead and injured children, decapitated and tortured bodies, and ruined cities. The article shows how news media coverage of the war's impact on the city of Aleppo invoked a Gothic tradition. Drawing on Kristeva and Freud's concepts of the abject and the uncanny, the article argues that the Gothic tradition can further International Relations research on the constitution of Selves and Others. The Gothic Other is constituted through the (Gothic) Self's repulsion, fascination, and desire, and the Gothic tradition revolves around an understanding of the invisible as an in-between space of fear and anticipation. The ability to recognise Gothic themes in an image depends on one's familiarity with the Gothic tradition, hence images are theorised as having a Gothic potentiality. The article focuses on how the Anglo-Saxon Gothic tradition enabled Western readers to identify Gothic themes in news coverage of the war in Aleppo. The article adopts a multimethod strategy including a content analysis of 457 images published by Western news media; a discourse analysis of news stories; an analysis of three Gothic, uncanny iconic motifs; and an author-created comic drawing on Gothic elements from the published photographs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This analysis uses the notion of anthropotechnics developed by the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk as its starting point. The author assumes that humans are exercising beings in that day by day we carry out a series of diary routines that allow us to shape our existence. Within this process, we encounter social institutions that guide those anthropotechnics exercises. From an exhaustive characterization of Sloterdijk's approach, we propose the notion of negative anthropotechnics (as the inverse of anthropotechnics) to refer to an alternative understanding of the counterindicated exercises that are performed in opposition to legitimized and idealized values of how to shape existence. We conclude that negative anthropotechnics can be an analytical resource to approach malpractice as a historical phenomenon and to the existential potency of some lives that are expressed as privileged negativity, abjection, or marginality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Girls' initiation contributes to cultural representations in Western folk fairy tales. This study examines girls' initiation in three contemporary versions of "Little Red Riding Hood", Angela Carter's "The Company of Wolves" and "Wolf-Alice" (1979), and Märta Tikkanen's Rödluvan (Little Red Riding Hood, 1986), in relation to "The Story of Grandmother", popularized by Paul Delarue (1956). Combining fairy-tale research with Kristevan theories on subjectivity, the feminine, and the genius, it examines how initiation assigns to the girl in Delarue's tale a social identity and role as a woman and how the contemporary tales negotiate this through the heroines' wooing of werewolves. The findings, presented in both written and visual forms, show the reach of the heroines' feminine psychosexual maturity, here called the girl genius, in Carter's and Tikkanen's versions, representing an alternative to traditional assumptions of girls' psychosexuality within normative heterosexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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