Abjection

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Hey, witches! This week, in the spirit of Halloween, we're re-releasing an episode from our very first season of Material Girls, Goblin Mode by The Abject, with guest expert Michaela Coyle.

As you may remember, in 2022, Oxford English

Dictionary's Word of the Year was the term Goblin Mode.

Nice.

And it's fine because she says a lot about Kristeva in that one too.

So in Sexual Subversions, she introduces some of the key concepts in Kristeva's work, including, of course, the abject, which she describes as, quote, "...a sickness at one's own body, at the body beyond that clean and proper thing, the body of the subject." Abjection is the result of recognizing that the body is more than in excess of the clean and proper." So it's like, I want my body to be like...

enclosed and tidy and manageable i want it to sort of map onto my sense of myself as a like cleanly distinguished subject but when i remember that it doesn't that like actually my body is a colony for a billion bacteria that like freaks me out because it challenges it reminds me that my body is in excess of what i want it to be from the perspective of my subjectivity