An impressive list of authors examine how abjection can be discussed in relation to a host of different subjects, including marginality and gender.

An impressive list of authors examine how abjection can be discussed in relation to a host of different subjects, including marginality and gender.

In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva offers an extensive and profound consideration of the nature of abjection. Drawing on Freud and Lacan, she analyzes the nature of attitudes toward repulsive subjects and examines the function of these topics in the writings of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and other authors. Kristeva identifies the abject with the eruption of the real and the presence of death. She explores how art and religion each offer ways of purifying the abject, arguing that amid abjection, boundaries between subject and object break down.

In Abject Performances Leticia Alvarado draws out the irreverent, disruptive aesthetic strategies used by Latino artists and cultural producers who shun standards of respectability that are typically used to conjure concrete minority identities. In place of works imbued with pride, redemption, or celebration, artists such as Ana Mendieta, Nao Bustamante, and the Chicano art collective known as Asco employ negative affects—shame, disgust, and unbelonging—to capture experiences that lie at the edge of the mainstream, inspirational Latino-centered social justice struggles. Drawing from a diverse expressive archive that ranges from performance art to performative testimonies of personal faith-based subjection, Alvarado illuminates modes of community formation and social critique defined by a refusal of identitarian coherence that nonetheless coalesce into Latino affiliation and possibility.

Moving image culture seems to privilege the instantly identifiable: the recognizable face, the well-timed stunt, the perfectly synchronized line of dialogue. Yet perfect, in-focus visibility does not come 'naturally' to the moving image, and if there is one visual effect the eye of the camera can record better than the human eye it is blur. Looking beyond popular media to works of experimental cinema and video art, this groundbreaking collection addresses the aesthetics and politics of moving images in states of decay, distortion, indistinctness and fragmentation. A range of international scholars examines what is at stake in these images' sometimes radical foregrounding of materiality and mediation, or of evanescence and spectrality, as well as their challenging of the dominant position accorded to 'legible' images. How have artists and filmmakers rendered the 'indefinite' image, and what questions does it pose? With a range of approaches, from aesthetics to phenomenology to production studies, the authors in this volume investigate techniques, themes and concepts that emerge from this wilful excavation of the moving image's material base.

Providing an extensive reassessment of dominant and recurring themes in Ballard's writing, including historical violence, pornography, post 9/11 politics, and urban space, this book also engages with Ballard's 'late' modernism; his experimentation with style and form; and his sustained interests in psychology and psychopathology.

Contemporary audiences are often shocked to learn that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, medical students around the world posed for photographic portraits with their cadavers; a genre known as dissection photography. Featuring previously unseen images, stories, and anecdotes, this book explores the visual culture of death within the gross anatomy lab through the tradition of dissection photography, examining its historical aspects from both photographic and medical perspectives. The author pays particular attention to the use of dissection photographs as an expression of student identity, and as an evolving transgressive ritual intricately connected to, and eventually superseding, the act of dissection itself.