I am a woman. And as a woman, I, both on and off
screen, have always been characterized by emotion. And while this does not apply to all people
who identify as women, I really relate to it. I get this twisted sense of feeling alive when
something on screen has the power to produce a visceral reaction within me! In these moments,
I feel truly tethered to the art I’m consuming. For centuries in art, the female body has been
a site of spectacle. Ever since the Marquis de Sade published his erotic writings in the 18th
century, spectators have taken great pleasure in watching emotion wrought on the female
body. Back in 1975, Laura Mulvey took issue with this - arguing that spectatorship over the
female body is a net negative, a voyeuristic, oppressive mechanism of what she calls “the
male gaze”. For years, the agreed upon idea was that women’s bodies on screen are created
by men, for men. In these critiques, the male spectator is the assumed audience. But the female
spectator is often neglected. What does she like? This is the central focus of Linda Williams 1991
essay, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess”. She explores the way film audiences are both
drawn to and repulsed by excess on screen, using the example of her then-seven-year-old son - who
thoroughly enjoyed the terror of Nightmare on Elm Street, but drew the line at “kissing” movies, or
“weepies” as Williams puts it. She distinguishes three genres that produce a strong physical
reaction in viewers - the first is horror, designed to inspire feelings of terror, the second
is porn, designed to evoke feelings of elation, and the third is “weepies” - which… make you weep.
These are called “body genres” - and what brings them together is that all three have historically
been cast off as “trash” or “fluff”. Williams says, “What seems to bracket these particular
genres from others is an apparent lack of proper esthetic distance, a sense of over-involvement
in sensation and emotion.” These films, we think, manipulate our sensibilities - tear jerkers, fear
jerkers, and just plain jerkers appeal to emotions that fall outside the boundaries of societal
values. Crying, fear, and even the vulnerability that comes after… you know, are not exactly
viewed as strengths in a patriarchal world. Yet, as I alluded to earlier, Williams finds
that it's precisely within the body genres that women are the target audience
or the primary subjects. She argues, “There is thus a real need to be clearer
than we have been about what is in masochism for women - how power and pleasure operate in
fantasies of domination which appeal to women.” Now, more than ever, the body horror genre is
coming into prestige. The Witch, Swallow, Raw, Possessor, have all gained a great
amount of acclaim in recent years. Most recently, Julia Ducournau’s neon film,
Titane, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. It’s garnered a huge amount of attention for its
extreme violence and gore. And at the moment, all my female-identifying friends,
including myself, are clamouring to see it. So we have to ask - why are
women so drawn to body genres? Yhara Zayd has an incredible video on the link
between feminine sexuality and monstrosity in horror - tracing this history back to
Carrie in 1976. It’s required viewing. But I want to add another element to Yhara’s
point: what these horror movies, and body genres in general seem to offer up - and the reason
they provoke physical reactions within us, and maybe the reason they’re loved
by female-identifying audiences, is that they place a great focus on the abject. Abjection, or “the abject” - is a theory
developed by philosopher Julia Kristeva. It’s a phenomenon by which human beings
react physically to the sight of something corporeal - or, in other words, something that
threatens the distinction between the self, and what is outside of it. This is a difficult
concept. But I think the experience of abjection can be best described in the feeling you get
when looking at a human cadaver, or corpse. The corpse, a human in physical form with no signs
of humanity within it, is a potent reminder of our own mortality. It’s an uncanny blending of
the self, our inner spirit, and the Other, our physical, material bodies. The corpse can make you
recoil, but it can also evoke morbid fascination. Kristeva extends this idea to a number of sights
- similar feelings can occur when we see vomit, bile, blood, or feces - bodily fluids that
are typically inside which have escaped. But it’s not just about the body itself. She also
uses the example of footage from Auschwitz - these images are abject, not just because they
portray a violent mutilation of human life, but also because they symbolize a “fragility of
the law” - a horrific display of the ultimate, premeditated betrayal. In Kristeva’s words,
“It is thus not the lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what
disturbs identity, system, and order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules.
The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.” Horror movies are a clear example of abjection. In
female-centric narratives, we often see imagery of menstrual blood, or the excessive consumption
of meats or carcasses - symbolism that’s relied upon a lot in the abject art movement. But another
characteristic of abject art is its use of women as a site of transgression. Throughout history,
the female body has been a scientific mystery - an intractable frontier. Even with the infinite
advances in modern medicine today, women’s health continues to be widely misunderstood.
Mary Russo argues that the women’s sexual organs, the “cavernous anatomical female body”,
is deemed innately grotesque by its dark, damp invisibility. Much like a cave, it
contains all the abjection of the world and should thus be shunned. In this sense,
the female body is a marker of impurity. Abject art plays with this idea - presenting
the female body as a liminal space, where the discomfort of abjection can take place.
But a lot of this art, and films in particular, are considered prestigious for this
intellectual approach - which slightly defeats the purpose of Kristeva’s theory. For
something to be truly abject in her terms, it needs to be cast off by its
audience. So what I’m interested in, is female-driven art that, at the time,
or over time, is rejected by society. For example, when Jennifer’s Body
came out in 2009, it was met with extreme backlash - towards Diablo Cody, towards
Megan Fox, and towards their film as a whole. Yhara also has a great video on the poor
marketing behind Jennifer’s Body which led to its initial failure - I’ll link
it in the description. But all you have to know for this video is that audiences and
critics hated this movie when it came out, largely contributing to a major downturn in
both Megan Fox and Diablo Cody’s careers. The movie was seen as a failure in every facet
of the term - not scary enough, not funny enough, not exploitation enough, not feminist enough,
and most egregiously - not sexy enough. And this is why it’s an interesting case study in
abject theory. Jennifer’s Body displays a lot of common tropes in female-driven horror. It’s a
bit of a rape revenge exploitation movie - where Jennifer’s sacrifice reads as an allegory
for sexual assault. It’s a ‘monstrous girl’ movie - with Jennifer’s actual body transforming
violently at multiple instances in the film, and it’s also gross - Jennifer frequently
projectile vomits, she sits on the floor and horks down fistfuls of meat, she animalistically
cannibalizes her victims. But it's more than just the fact that it fulfills these tropes. What
makes Jennifer's Body abject is twofold: (1) the grotesque transgressions of Megan Fox as a star,
and (2) the fact that audiences rejected the movie because they had no idea where to place it. As
Kristeva writes, “Abjection… is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a
hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor
who sells you up, a friend who stabs you.” In 2009, people were repulsed by Diablo
Cody’s sleight of hand - creating a feminist, exploitation horror flick with one of the most
celebrated sex symbols of the time. Megan Fox was supposed to be the ultimate hot girl - what she
was not supposed to be was a grotesque monster. Its uncompromising camp dialogue, transcendence
of genre, and deeply unsexual preoccupation with Megan Fox, made audiences uncomfortable with
Jennifer’s Body. It was a fundamental betrayal of the male fantasy. And in true abject
fashion, it was cast off as a bad movie. Only now are people beginning to embrace
Jennifer’s Body as a feminist cult classic. We’re now in a post-MeToo world where feminist
horror and revenge thrillers are acclaimed, and Jennifer’s Body has finally found its
place. But its legacy will continue to be dominated by the abject reaction
it produced when it came out. Abjection isn’t just limited to horror. The
increase in explicitly feminist media over the past decade or so has also led to an expansion
in what women are allowed to do on screen. One piece of media that pioneered
this expansion back in 2012, was Girls. Surprise! I’m talking about Lena Dunham. Now there are many fair criticisms surrounding
Lena Dunham and her show, Girls - mainly that she has a tendency to portray New York like
Lincoln Nebraska with her inability to write BIPOC people into her scripts, and that she has an
overall painfully un-self aware public presence. But there’s one type of critique waged against
Dunham and Girls that really bothers me. Girls is very frank in its portrayals of sex
and the female body - particuarly the body of Lena Dunham. She frequently appears fully
naked on screen, and at the time it was pretty revolutionary to see a woman of proportions that
were atypical for mass media in this light. Dunham is not skinny, but she’s not fat - she is in
the middle - which is an in between that we, as consumers, are not used to seeing, even
though Dunham’s body type is quite average for the general population of America. But not only is
Dunham naked - her character Hannah is also a bit gross for TV. She poops, farts, burps, vomits,
and performs many bodily functions on screen that repulse us. And of course, at the time and
perhaps even more throughout the years, Hannah’s perceived slovenliness and by extension, Dunham’s,
have been increasingly indicted by the public. There’s obviously a point to Hannah’s demeanor on
Girls. Rebecca Wanzo finds that Hannah’s abject qualities are symptoms of her precariousness
as a millennial writer living in New York. Hannah is having trouble with all the various
aspects of her life - her flimsy career, tumultuous love life, waning friendships,
and struggles with OCD. Hannah, now that her well-off parents have cut her off
financially, is precarious. And as Wanzo writes: “Abjection is often a principal sign of
these characters’ precarity—they inhabit spaces where they often recoil from
others and others recoil from them, and their constant association
with the gross (things like dirt, vomit, and feces) are habitually signs of what
emotional and economic insecurity has wrought.” Hannah wears her abjection on her sleeve as
a defence mechanism - if she’s going to be precarious she may as well set herself apart from
others. In embracing the abject, Hannah is able to control her own identity at an age where she
feels she has little agency over anything else. In Wanzo’s words, “Claiming difference,
alienation, isolation, and specialness is part of how Hannah shores up her identity—particularly as
a writer. Girls imagines modes of women’s creation in the face of a precarity that
disrupts subjectivity and agency.” Yet the public’s inability to grapple with a
female character who’s so blatantly abject, coupled with their revulsion towards
Dunham’s controversial star persona, has led to a widespread public rejection
of Dunham, and by extension her show, as self-indulgent, annoying, and just plain gross. The same goes for female comedians like Margaret
Cho, Ali Wong, Whitney Cummings, Tiffany Haddish, and Amy Schumer. Now, again, there are
many fair criticisms waged against these women - particularly Schumer - who has been widely
accused of plagiarizing jokes, and frequently making racist comments in her routines and shows.
Yet, like Dunham, female comics seem to ignite a fury in audiences that goes beyond individual
critique. So we can fall into the old “women aren’t funny” adage that 14 year old boys like
to spin on Tiktok - but if we’re to look a little closer at the throughline between contemporary
comedians like Cho, Wong, Cummings, or Schumer - you’ll notice that they tend eschew a
level of vulgarity - or grotesqueness, that rubs audiences the wrong way. Joking about pooping
one’s pants, or losing control of your bodily functions during intercourse, or just having a lot
of intercourse in general and talking about it at length to an audience, exposes a taboo. Of course,
male comedians have been using vulgarity, edgy humour, and self-deprecation for years, but that’s
something we’re used to seeing in popular media. The female body, on the other hand, is ornamental.
As Maggie Hennefeld puts it, “To be funny through one’s grotesque bodily difference thereby offers
an alternative means for pursuing freedom and belonging in a hypercommodified, image-obsessed,
perniciously unstable media environment.” Much of the response towards Dunham
and Schumer is wrapped up in framing fatness - if we can even call them that,
as something that is abject in itself - the excessiveness of bodily flesh that seems to
transgress borders set by the media. But in the case of Margaret Cho, these borders are
both metaphorical and literal. She recalls in one of her standup routines a moment where one
of the producers of her show, All American Girl, told her that the network was concerned with
the fullness of her face on screen, going on to relay that they were concerned about how she
was “really overweight”. According to Rachel Lee, Cho’s abjection lies in the way she confronts
the liminality of her fleshy, racialized body. In her routine, Cho says, “I didn’t know what to
say to that. I always thought I was okay looking. I had no idea I was this giant face that was
taking over America. HERE COMES THE FACE!!!”. Lee argues that this retort “hyperbolizes
the national crisis imagined to occur when a Korean face appears on-screen: the event is
likened to an invasion or a deluge of too much immigrant/foreign body.” So not only does Cho’s
abject body transgress the borders of femininity, it’s also, according to Lee, a symbolic reminder
of the myth of immigrant invasion -- particularly that of “yellow fever” - a literal trespassing
of borders. The racialized East Asian body is imagined in the West to be small, passive, and
hypersexalized - yet Margaret Cho transgresses this symbolic order of orientalism.
Her comedy is thus perceived as abject. It’s easy to dismiss these types of reactions
to people like Dunham or the female comedians by saying that they’re just gross or annoying.
But the explanation I prefer is a bit more complicated. You thought I’d stop
at Lena Dunham or Amy Schumer? Oh no - since this is the month of Halloween,
I figured it’d be fun to scare you all with a bit of Freudian psychoanalytic
feminist film theory. Strap in! Essentially, Kristeva uses Jacques Lacan’s
concept of the “mirror stage” to underscore her theory of abjection. The mirror stage is
the moment when a baby or toddler witnesses themself in the mirror for the first
time. Until this point, the child has been developing an understanding of themselves
through their surroundings - their mother, their father, their siblings. But upon looking
at themself in the mirror, they come to realize themselves as a material object - a human with
a physical, and most importantly mortal, form. This is an incredibly uncanny experience.
It doesn’t necessarily need to occur in front of a physical mirror - but instead
represents the process through which the child becomes detached from their mother and
begins to develop as an individual being. For Kristeva, this stage is central to the
child’s indoctrination into a patriarchal social order - one that forces the child to
reject the maternal and the feminine - which are potent reminders of their own mortality.
After all, they were once inside the mother, and now they’ve been expelled from her into
the physical world. For the growing child, anything feminine becomes abject.
Kristeva writes, most melodramatically: “Out of the daze that has petrified
him before the untouchable, impossible, absent body of the mother, a daze that has
cut off his impulses from their objects, that is, from their representations, out of
such daze he causes, along with loathing, one word to crop up—fear. The phobic
has no other object than the abject. But that word, "fear"—a fluid
haze, an elusive clamminess—no sooner has it cropped up than it shades off
like a mirage and permeates all words of the language with nonexistence, with a hallucinatory,
ghostly glimmer. Thus, fear having been bracketed, discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly
confront that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is
unapproachable and intimate: the abject.” You can write this off as total, outlandish BS, but it’s hard to deny that when audiences look at
the grotesque feminine on screen - the uncanniness of Megan Fox’s objectified body transforming into
an cannibalistic monster, or of Lena Dunham’s unconventional body experiencing pleasure or
engaging in socially disruptive behaviour, or of Amy Schumer or Margaret Cho disclosing
stories about their genitals and bowel movements to a public audience for laughs - they reject it
- or rather, they abject it. The woman abjecting herself is the greatest terror of them all. The
grotesque feminine, according to psychoanalysts, is an existential threat - a fundamental
taboo that needs to be cast off. THE FEMALE-IDENTIFYING SPECTATOR
So why on earth do abject women persist in popular media? If we’re so repulsed
by them, why do they continue to appear, and why do we continue to watch them?
Well, much as the heterosexual male spectator experiences pleasure at the site of
the objectified woman on screen - the female spectator experiences catharsis at the abject -
a great release of social restraints. This media alienates and discomfits male audiences, but its
abjection distorts social boundaries and images that confine women. For Kristeva, abject art
is cathartic. She says, “The various means of purifying the abject—the various catharses—make
up the history of religions, and end up with that catharsis par excellence called art, both
on the far and near side of religion.” And for Linda Williams, this catharsis is predominantly
experienced by female-identifying spectators. Maybe the reason women are drawn to abjection is
a similar reason that true crime is so popular among female-identifying audiences: there is
power in viewership and voyeurism - power in watching the extremes of society displayed
on screen at your behest. If male viewers experience euphoria in watching power dominated
over women on screen - then women who abject themselves on screen transfer this source of
power to the female spectator. Maybe that’s why a lot of feminist media has increasingly
embraced the abject as the years go on. It’s important to note at this point
that the criticism against people like Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer as the ultimate
champions of white feminism isn’t exactly inextricable from their abject presences in
popular culture. As I said earlier on, abjection is the state of being cast off. This exists in
the societal sense as well - not just in art. In her book, Revolting Subjects, Imogen Tyler uses
abject theory to explore the various ways that abjection plays out among social groups - and the
different ways it's experienced by the haves and the have nots. She uses the example of how certain
populations were abjected in Thatcher’s Britain. When implementing stringent cuts to the welfare
state, it was decided that certain populations, grotesque in their helplessness, were unfit
to exist in society and undeserving of social handouts. This extends to many Western societies:
- in Victorian England it was unwed mothers and sex workers. In contemporary America, it’s
impoverished Black communities, people with disabilities, people experiencing homelessness,
and disenfranchised Indigenous populations, among others. For Tyler, this state of being cast
off, or abjected by society, can be internalized. She argues, “Disgust is not just enacted by
subjects and groups in processes of othering, distinction-making, distancing and boundary
formation, but is also experienced and lived by those constituted as disgusting in their
experiences of displacement and abandon.” She references Mary Douglas’s
theory on purity - which, I myself referenced to the horror
of millions in my Parasite video. Remember this? Disgust is an inherently
marginalizing tool - used to build social boundaries between different groups. So the
question, then, is who gets to be abject today? Rebecca Wanzo compares precarity in Lena
Dunham’s Girls with how it's explored in Issa Rae’s Awkward Black girl. She says: “There
may be freedom in a middle-class white “girl” associating herself with sexual
abjection, dirt, and feces, given traditional representations of pure
white womanhood; but, perhaps unsurprisingly, a black “girl” may resist or play with
Western constructions of the concept.” Black women, along with other people whose bodies
have been historically cast off and discarded by society, do not have the same freedoms
in popular media, to be explicitly abject. White women, whose bodies have existed in the
historical imaginary as chaste, restrained, and delicate - may embrace abjection because it
transcends the boundaries of their established social order. But certain marginalized
groups, Black people, transgender people, Indigenous people, acutely impovished
people, people with disabilities, - and particularly anyone in these social groups
who identifies as a woman, have had to work for years and continue to work on making it
inside the established social order altogeher. WHAT NOW? But what is the established social order anyway?
Why does it get to decide who and what is abject? And should anyone continue to strive towards it at
all? This order, which creates narrow boundaries for what is socially digestible, completely
flattens complexity, nuance, difference, and even the entire human condition. All
human beings are inherently a bit abject, we’re fleshy, we ooze liquids, we rot when we
die, we’re complicated, and sometimes awful - and rejecting these fundamental traits - making them
taboo, will get us nowhere. There is a liberatory quality to the abject. Rather than placing a
moral qualification on it, we should understand it as an innate human experience that’s shaped
along social, cultural, and political lines. And since it's not going away anytime soon,
we just have to figure out what to do with it. In her book, Against Purity, Alexis Shotwell
attempts to map out a future where we let go of the idea of purity - a future where we stop
clinging to some fantasy of an original wholeness, or a world that was once completely pure.
She says, and this is quite beautiful: “[T]here is no primordial state
we might wish to get back to, no Eden we have desecrated, no
pre-toxic body we might uncover through enough chia seeds and kombucha […]
There is not a preracial state we could access, erasing histories of slavery, forced labor
on railroads, colonialism, genocide, and their concomitant responsibilities and
requirements. There is no food we can eat, clothing we can buy, or energy we can use without
deepening our ties to complex webs of suffering.” The world was marred from the beginning - and
there’s no real way to wipe it clean. All “purity” does is project a feeling that there is some
fundamental flaw within us as humans for being undisciplined, or unruly. For Shotwell, we need
to move towards a “constitutive impurity” - which embraces imperfection not as a boundary to
be policed, but one that is porous - that connects us to the earth. What she’s getting at
is that to live ethically, we have to confront impurity head on. And I think this could be
a wonderful, radical approach to abjection. Abjection is best imagined as an
artistic rendering of impurity, or a celebration of border crossing. Body genres
and grotesque feminism contain a wonderful impurity within them. And rather than restraining
the abject - or using it to cast others away, or limiting who it can be used by in media, we
should use it as a compass for unearthing all our complexities and contradictions. ‘Cause
at the end of the day, life is a bit gross.
