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Maternal Abject (Kristeva)

It is in The Powers of Horror that Julia Kristeva's theory of the abject and abjection is most rigorously discussed. According to Kristeva, the abject can be defined as that which is radically rejected and excluded by a subject/society, with abjection therefore referring to the actual process of expelling all that is other to oneself. It is through abjection that one manage to create boundaries and establish order (within the self and in society) by pushing the unacceptable and the threatening to the periphery. As the title of Kristeva's text suggests, facing the abject is associated with feelings of horror and revolt, and yet, no matter how furiously it is spurned, the abject never entirely recedes, but rather remains on the margins, hovering and haunting one's sense of subjectivity and orderliness and with the potential to unravel the confines that have been constructed.

The Maternal Body as Abject

As far as the concept of the maternal abject is concerned, this relates to Kristeva's positing of the maternal body as the ultimate example of the abject for two key reasons. First of all, the pregnant body itself, as a place where the binary division between self and other has become blurred, is a prime site of the abject and a direct threat to the traditional (and masculine) notion of an autonomous, unified, single subject. The expectant mother undergoes a series of physical changes that are beyond the control of subject and experiences a body that is fragmented and fused with an other, where the borders of the self and other cannot hold.

Second, according to Kristeva, because it is with the maternal body that women experience their first sense of oneness (the infant comes into being without the boundaries between itself and the mother having been established yet), it is this connection to the mother that must be renounced—that is, abjected—by the child in order for the latter to establish his/her subjectivity. However, as the child has been part of the mother, it is impossible to reject her completely, even more so in the case of the daughter, who, given the strong links between the maternal body and womanhood through abjecting the mother, risks abjecting herself. Hence, Kristeva's depiction of the abject as something that, although rejected, remains on the margins, its puissance dormant but not extinct. This inability to fully forsake the mother, especially where the daughter is concerned, is certainly a feature of much women's writing, where an attempt to return to the mother and recover her from the position of abjection can often be detected.

Diagnosing the Oppression

Kristeva's concept of the maternal abject is also useful in diagnosing the dynamics of the oppression of women. By encouraging the abjection of the mother, maternal power (the main threat to patriarchy) is greatly diminished (this would support the psychoanalyst Karen Horney's theory of “womb envy”). Furthermore, if in patriarchal society, women's role has been reduced to the maternal function (reproduction) and it is necessary to abject the maternal so as to establish one's subjectivity, then all women and femininity are abjected along with the maternal, thus explaining their second-rate status in patriarchal culture.

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