Performance Research Volume 19 Issue 1
On Abjection
Issue editors: Rina Arya and Nicholas Chare
ISSN: 1352-8165 (2014) 19:1
This issue On Abjection aims to invigorate debates about abjection and show the resonance and impact that the concept continues to have for thinking about the performing arts. There has been a tendency to equate abjection with its products; to employ it as a code for bodily fluids and other disgust-provoking phenomena. Such a reduction is detrimental because it minimizes the importance of other aspects of abjection in favour of the gratuitous display of the bodily. This issue examines a number of ways in which the concept of abjection enhances understanding of various works of modern and contemporary performance involving boundary crossings between different states and also analyzes what such performances potentially reveal about the limitations of current theorizations of the abject.
Introduction
Rina Arya, Nicholas Chare
pp. 1 - 4
Taking Apart the Body : Abjection and body art
Rina Arya
pp. 5 - 14
No Pictures : Blind Date and Abject Masculinity
Karen Gonzalez Rice
pp. 15 - 24
Abjection and Informe : Operations of debasing
Konstantina Georgelou
pp. 25 - 34
Live Fast, Die Young, Leave a Useful Corpse : The terrible utility of David Wojnarowicz
Lauren DeLand
pp. 33 - 40
Taste My Sorrow : Caught horribly, somewhere, between the pregnant and the maternal
Kirsten Hudson
pp. 41 - 51
Acting Dead and Other Maniacal Stories : The abject work of Cricot2, after Kantor
Daniel Watt
pp. 52 - 62
Approaching Abjection in Sarah Kane’s Blasted
Sarah Ablett
pp. 63 - 71
Abject Metamorphosis and Mirthless Laughter : On human-to-animal transitions and ‘the disease of being finite’
Shaun May
pp. 72 - 80
Improvising Themes of Abjection with Maggie Nicols
D Ferrett
pp. 81 - 90
Literary Veins : Women’s bodybuilding, muscle worship and abject performance
Nicholas Chare
pp. 91 - 101
Abjection, Remembering and the Still-Performing Document
Kelsy Vivash
pp. 102 - 110
A Story of Rats : Associations on Bataille’s simulacrum of abjection
Jeremy Biles
pp. 111 - 125
Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure (review)
Melanie Bennett
pp. 126 - 129
The Queer Art of Failure (review)
J. Paul Halferty
pp. 130 - 132
Notes on Contributors
pp. 133 - 134
