That’s how order works, how we get through everyday without going crazy. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.” These things disrupt the Symbolic, meaning they disrupt the way that language works: if you see something that looks like a tree, you expect it to be a tree. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. By labeling certain things as gross, the tribe - and society - was able to survive.įor Kristeva, the abject applies to that which makes one retch, but it is also, on a deeper level, “what disturbs identity, system, order.
Homosexuality was made abject, because if you didn’t have sex that could make babies, you’d kill off the tribe. Incest was made abject because sleeping with your family members would result in genetically deformed children - and eventually kill off the tribe. Eating pork was made abject because pigs were likely to pass along diseases - and kill off the tribe. So what do you do? You make a woman’s menstrual cycle into something dirty and shameful - and write laws (still on the biblical books) that send that woman to a hut while menstruating. Accessing the abject would be to risk disease and, ultimately, death. The Judaic Tribes of the Hebrew Bible created laws concerning what was and wasn’t abject so that they wouldn’t die out: people naturally wanted to do things like have sex with their wives when the wives were on their periods, but when you’re living in the desert, as these Judaic Tribes were, you just can’t get yourself clean enough. but also that which crosses borders and confuses. Abjection includes that which is dirty - feces, decay, etc. The theory of abjection is most famously pronounced in the work of Julia Kristeva, who, in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, theorized the role of the abject in the building of both society and the psyche. In Coven’s premiere, the Supreme Witch, Fiona (Jessica Lange) tells her daughter, Cordelia (Sarah Paulson) that her running of the witch academy has been an “abject failure” ten minutes later, the tour guide of Madame Lalaurie’s home calls it a site of “abject horror.” It connotes a depth of something we don’t usually reach.īut I want to talk about a slightly different connotation to see if we can get to why American Horror Story treads the knife-edge between feminism and misogyny - and why so many of us can’t stop watching it.Ībjection is more than just a depth of experience: it’s a theory of grossness, of confusion, of what we must reject in order to live. You hear that word - abject - and think of something done horribly, wretchedly. This is the stuff of abjection, and American Horror Story: Coven is overflowing with it. A vagina that destroys all that enters it. Billed Into Silence: Money and the Miseducation of WomenĪn African-American albino.
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