From the films of Larry Clark to the feminist comedy of Amy Schumer to the fall of Louis C. K., comedic, graphic, and violent moments of abjection have permeated twentieth- and twenty-first-century social and political discourse. The contributors to Abjection Incorporated move beyond simple critiques of abjection as a punitive form of social death, illustrating how it has become a contested mode of political and cultural capital—empowering for some but oppressive for others. Escaping abjection's usual confines of psychoanalysis and aesthetic modernism, core to theories of abjection by thinkers such as Kristeva and Bataille, the contributors examine a range of media, including literature, photography, film, television, talking dolls, comics, and manga. Whether analyzing how comedic abjection can help mobilize feminist politics or how expressions of abjection inflect class, race, and gender hierarchies, the contributors demonstrate the importance of competing uses of abjection to contemporary society and politics. They emphasize abjection's role in circumscribing the boundaries of the human and how the threats abjection poses to the self and other, far from simply negative, open up possibilities for radically new politics.
Contributors. Meredith Bak, Eugenie Brinkema, James Leo Cahill, Michelle Cho, Maggie Hennefeld, Rob King, Thomas Lamarre, Sylvère Lotringer, Rijuta Mehta, Mark Mulroney, Nicholas Sammond, Yiman Wang, Rebecca Wanzo
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Not It, or, The Abject Objection
- Chapter 1: The Politics of Abjection
- Part I. Abject Performances: Subjectivity, Identity, Individuality
- Chapter 2: Popular Abjection and Gendered Embodiment in South Korean Film Comedy
- Chapter 3: Precarious-Girl Comedy: Issa Rae, Lena Dunham, and Abjection Aesthetics
- Chapter 4: Abject Feminism, Grotesque Comedy, and Apocalyptic Laughter on Inside Amy Schumer
- Part II. Abject Bodies: Humans, Animals, Objects
- Chapter 5: The Animal and the Animalistic: China’s Late 1950s Socialist Satirical Comedy
- Chapter 6: Anticolonial Folly and the Reversals of Repatriation
- Chapter 7: Between Technology and Toy: The Talking Doll as Abject Artifact
- Chapter 8: Absolute Dismemberment: The Burlesque Natural History of Georges Bataille
- Chapter 9: Why, an Abject Art
- Part III. Abject Aesthetics: Structure, Form, System
- Chapter 10: A Matter of Fluids: EC Comics and the Vernacular Abject
- Chapter 11: Spit * Light * Spunk: Larry Clark, an Aesthetic of Frankness
- Chapter 12: A Series of Ugly Feelings: Fabulation and Abjection in Shōjo Manga
- Chapter 13: Powers of Comedy, or, The Abject Dialectics of Louie
- Contributors
- Index
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