Women and Abjection: Margins of Difference, Bodies of Art

Abstract

The production and performance of the contemporary subject depends upon constituting and regulating processes of the social. Gender as a constructed category may be contrasted to that of “sex,†with its contested links to a pre-symbolic, inaccessible “naturalness.†To define the parameters of “human†and “subject†is to redline difference, norms constituted on the back of deviance. The abject challenges the power of the social to shape and regulate human bodies. Women artists in the 1990s deployed the abject through choice of form and content to deterritorialize everyday relations to food, bodies, sex, and death. They may have been attempting to destabilize such 1970s art world notions as “women’s work†and a biologically determined sisterhood by propagating the threat of the “hyperfeminine.†These “shouts-outs†from the art market margins may serve to challenge existing norms of visual culture, or they may serve to further marginalize or constrict boundaries between inside and outside, selves and others.