Studying Men and Masculinities by David Buchbinder

Author:David Buchbinder [Buchbinder, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Gender Studies, General, Social Science, Men's Studies, Sociology
ISBN: 9780415578295
Google: TmfUzE4WnW8C
Amazon: 0415578299
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-09-15T13:00:23+00:00

However, Kristeva draws our attention to the fact that “filth is not a quality in itself, but it applies only to what relates to a boundary and, more particularly, represents the object jettisoned out of that boundary, its other side, a margin” (Kristeva, 1982: 69; original emphasis). That is, an object, person or event becomes defiling only when a boundary has been transgressed, and a margin that defines the polluted from the pure, the improper from the proper, is established at the edge of that boundary. Yet, at the same time, that which is polluting blurs the boundary between the proper (in both senses as “appropriate to” or “characteristic of,” and “clean and pure”) and the improper. It suggests that the boundary is permeable, maybe even only temporary.

Abjection thus sets up the possibility that the boundaries that establish the meanings of “filthy” and “clean” are, at the same time, undermined and rendered ineffectual. It is for this reason that Kristeva observes, “what is abject, ... the jettisoned object, ... draws me toward the place where meaning collapses” (Kristeva, 1982: 2; original emphasis):

A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death – a flat encephalograph, for instance – I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. Today, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit – cadere [Latin for “to fall”], cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel, “I” is expelled.

(Kristeva, 1982: 3–4; original emphasis)

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