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.

"This is an exceptional collection—the subject is of obvious importance, yet terribly undertheorized and unexamined. I know of no other work that offers what this collection provides."—Marcia Millman, author of Such a Pretty Face: Being Fat in America ". . . A valuable contribution to scholarly debates on the place of excessive bodies in contemporary culture. This book promises to enrich all areas of inquiry related to the politics of bodies."—Carole Spitzack, author of Confessing Excess: Women and the Politics of Body Reduction "This anthology includes a wide range of perceptive and original essays, which explore and analyze the underlying ideologies that have made fat "incorrect." Echoing the spirit of the nineteenth-century adage about children who should be neither seen nor heard, some of the authors powerfully remind us that we keep "bodies out of bound" silenced and unseen-unless, of course, we need to peek at the comic or grotesque."—Raquel Salgado Scherr, co-author of Face Value: The Politics of Beauty "Through textual analyses, video/film analyses, television theory, and literary theory, this collection demonstrates the various ways in which dominant representations of fat and corpulence have been both demonized and rendered invisible. . . . This volume will be a crucial corollary to work on the tyranny of slenderness; a collection of different perspectives on the fat body is sorely missing in women's studies, communication, and media studies."—Sarah Banet-Weiser, author of The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity

Looking at sex and sexuality from a variety of historical, sociological and theoretical perspectives, as represented in a variety of media, Sex in Antiquity represents a vibrant picture of the discipline of ancient gender and sexuality studies, showcasing the work of leading international scholars as well as that of emerging talents and new voices. Sexuality and gender in the ancient world is an area of research that has grown quickly with often sudden shifts in focus and theoretical standpoints. This volume contextualises these shifts while putting in place new ideas and avenues of exploration that further develop this lively field or set of disciplines. This broad study also includes studies of gender and sexuality in the Ancient Near East which not only provide rich consideration of those areas but also provide a comparative perspective not often found in such collections. Sex in Antiquity is a major contribution to the field of ancient gender and sexuality studies.

The nine essays in this volume deal with several well known French authors through the ages - for example Descartes, Voltaire, Mme de Staël, Nerval, Verlaine - and explore the problematic relationship between dreams and literature. Generally speaking, contributors are interested in the production of literary meaning. How does various dream material, ranging from the traditional dream to visions and hallucinations and day dreams, come to be? And how is the dream image transformed into discourse? What exactly is the relationship between dream and narrative? Each essay focuses on a different author and different period, ranging from the Middle Ages to the late nineteenth-century, but also takes a unique critical and theoretical approach. What the contributors have in common, though, is an analytical, sensemaking strategy that characterizes the interpretation of dreams through the ages, from ancients such as Artemidorus and Cicero to modern thinkers such as Freud. Most of the texts studied here, from the Chanson de Roland to Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre-tombe, lend themselves to this type of approach because they promote narrative unity. So too do Voltaire, Mme de Staël, Nerval and Verlaine. Many if not most texts, however, in the end, turn out to be not quite so tightly-knit as one may have supposed at first and, in the case of Agrippa d'Aubigné and Descartes, the reader is in for several surprises when the normal course of events leading from dream to text, from signifier to signified, is interrupted and subverted.