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