Julia Kristeva and the Abject Woman
“I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit."
Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection is the most challenging thing I’ve ever read. Like, reread every sentence and then reread every page and still feel lost challenging. Give up and glare at myself in the mirror while regretting my student loans challenging.
Kristeva is one of the heroines of my “grotesque feminism” writing endeavor, though, so I fought the urge to give up and inched my way through both Powers of Horror and Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. For the uninitiated, grotesque is a visual art term that originated in the 15th century to denote the transgressing of nature’s laws. Plants with human faces, politicians with donkey bodies, dead people brought back to life, that kind of thing.
Fast forward to 1965 when Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian theorist whose name I’ve never spelled correctly on the first try, looked back at 15th century literature and saw how the body was portrayed in that context, creating a theory of grotesque realism and the grotesque body.
The grotesque body is porous, protruding, exchanging matter with other bodies and the world around it. It’s all about the “lower stratum” of the body and the actions of those parts—eating, fucking, shitting, vomiting, birthing, licking, pissing, you get it.
Those words make you blush because moral values were projected onto the actions of the lower stratum as human society developed to prefer privacy over public life. The grotesque body was free to laugh and play with other bodies in the medieval market square, but this openness came to be seen as unsanitary and unsafe, lewd and vulgar. Thus the grotesque body gave way to the “monumental” body of modernity, which is closed to the world.
Don’t get me wrong, the progression from grotesque/public to monumental/private makes plenty of sense; I’m a big fan of voting and eyeglasses and penicillin so I’m not about to act like the medieval times were some utopia. What doesn’t make sense is why monumentality is enforced more heavily on women than men.
Close your legs / girls don’t poop / hide the tampon up your sleeve so nobody sees / you’re dressed like a whore / you’re so emotional when you’re on the rag / burping isn’t ladylike / you should try Accutane / you should try Zoloft / you’re really gonna eat all that?
Why is the shame of the “natural” body pinned on women? Why isn’t anyone hating on men for their grotesque bodies?
I think Julia Kristeva can point us toward an answer. First, let me introduce her properly: Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, semiotician, psychoanalyst and novelist born in 1941. (I’m tempted to use the whole Bulgarian-French thing as an excuse for why reading her is so difficult, but… I will.) She’s an important name in structuralist and poststructuralist thought, and she’s written over 30 books.
One of Kristeva’s massive contributions to critical theory is her argument that signification is made up of two elements: the semiotic and the symbolic. The semiotic is associated with rhythm, sound and movement, and it is connected with the “pre-mirror stage” of human development when an infant cannot yet recognize their own subjectivity. The semiotic resists structure and does not need language to make meaning. Kristeva argues that the semiotic is rooted in the maternal body since the womb is the first source of sound and movement for all people.
In Black Sun, Kristeva argues that when a child reaches the stage of development where they realize their own subjectivity, they reject the maternal body in order to enter the realm of shared cultural meaning known as the symbolic. Think of this as a psychological cutting of the umbilical cord that marks the child’s entry into (phallocentric) culture.
The term Kristeva uses to describe this cutting of the cord is abjection.
The word comes from the Latin abiectus meaning “thrown away, cast off, rejected.” Mercifully, in Powers of Horror, Kristeva makes her theory of abjection accessible via a somewhat relatable experience: curdled milk.
“When the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk—harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring—I experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly; and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and bile, increase heartbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire.”
Kristeva says this reaction to rotten food—what she calls food loathing—is the “most elementary and most archaic form of abjection.” The body revolts against curdled milk, gray meat and month-old pork lo mein with an intensity borne of its deep desire to stay alive.
Though food loathing is a useful example, abjection is more than a reaction to something dangerous or toxic. Kristeva writes that it is “not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules.”
Consider the horror of seeing a dead body. The sight of it violates the border between two states: the animate and the inanimate. Our subjectivity is called into question by the sight of ourselves in object form. So we abject, physically and psychically lurching away from the ultimate Other that is death.
Kristeva argues that abjection generates identity by reasserting the border that is made ambiguous by the offending object. “I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit,” she says. Water the sobbing/vomiting reaction down a bit and we can see how abjecting the other can be interpreted as the root of oppression: To be sure of what I am, I must despise what I am not.
Is the psychological need to abject the maternal body, then, the root of misogyny? Leaving the maternal body to enter the world is a necessary part of human life, but the theory of abjection suggests that to identify with the world, the child turns around and draws a line between themself and the semiotic/pre-cultural realm, meaning that everything on the other side of that line is identified as a threat to the system.
This explains the binary opposition that sets woman/nature/body/emotion/chaos against man/culture/mind/logic/order. Organized human society is threatened by nature, chaos, that which resists structure, and identifying the semiotic realm with the feminine provides a scapegoat.
As an undertaker puts lipstick on the gray lips of a dead body to conceal the abjecting sight of death, so does the patriarchy impose the mask of monumentality onto women to conceal the abjecting sight of nature.
We are all animals running around eating and shitting, getting sick and dying, swapping spit and making love. The grotesque body may seem to undermine modern culture, but the identification of women with the threat of nature is misplaced. The maternal function (having a uterus) is not an essential part of womanhood and womanhood is not an essential part of the maternal function.
The argument of “grotesque feminism” is that we can dissolve the harmful binary of gender by lifting the veil of monumentality, forcing the patriarchy to face its fear of those of us who identify with both the semiotic (via the maternal function) and the symbolic (via our involvement in culture). Wiping the lipstick of the dead body, if you will.
Destabilizing the binary of gender—and the other reductive binaries that Western culture clings to—frees people from the oppression of abjection. As Hélène Cixous wrote in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” “We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing.”
I recently delved into Julia Kristeva's theories, they’re super interesting. Your essay is a clear and beautiful addition, very well and clearly written! Thank you!