Waste’s dominion: the gymnastics of value in informal markets*

Abstract

This paper examines sites of informal trade in Morocco, what the locals call joutiat (sing. joutia). It departs from the semantic and real-world politics of disposability (of objects and people), to unravel the underlying meanings of the joutia as a contested space. The joutia is a place where not only objects of value wait to be rediscovered, but also where invisible and socially underprivileged beings perpetually ransack heaps of trade articles to unmask a hidden gem. I provide an account of the social dynamics of abjection inside/outside the joutia, arresting the ambivalence of objects, which – as they keep vacillating between value and lack of it – turn into “treashure”. I use this neologism, which combines two antithetical terms (trash and treasure), to (a) put into question issues of visibility and invisibility in informal Moroccan enterprises, (b) crystallise the paradoxes of being and becoming inside and outside the market arena, (c) offer a profound reflection on the absurd nature of value in the informal landscapes of (non)random economy and (d) demonstrate that the forms of abjection inside the market have their origin elsewhere.     

Oestrogen Rising 2016: Ireland’s stained and bloodied cloths

A weaver, seamstress, laundress and artist, in this essay I shall spin a yarn, tangle a web, and construct a text(ile) of the inter-weave of narrative and identity that I define as my intellectual, textual, somatic and material/visual practice obsessions. My work explores ‘the places in-between’ in the entanglements of Irish and Northern Irish gender and identity, and in the abject fabrics of death and of desire. As an Irish feminist, sense-making of the complexities, conundrums, challenges and contradictions of my land, my cloth, my body and my culture owes much to Irish women before me who fought for female suffrage, and Irish women now – north and south of the border that divides the island of Ireland – who still struggle for equality of citizenship, social justice, human rights, and full reproductive autonomy. My contention is that when we accept that Ireland herself is a many-layered cloth, a stained and bloodied cloth, a cloth marked irreversibly by history, conflict, denial and abuse, stained by its own repression, marked through denial of all its people’s rights and needs, and bloodied by its greatest export, the haemorrhage of its people, then – polemical, didactic or reflective, with more compassion, empathy, humility and heart – we just might make peace with our past.     

Politics: Butler's Corporeal Politics: Matters of Politicized Abjection

This essay examines the work of Judith Butler in relation to corporeality through an analysis of Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex and Butler's notion of politicized abjection. Abjection is considered in relation to bodily materiality and proposed as the most promising path for a revamped corporeal politics. Through a reading of two novels, Katherine Dunn's Geek Love and Barbara Gowdy's Mister Sandman, the essay examines how the abject body can function as politically subversive. Throughout, the essay analyses Butler's placing of the material body in a political domain, and argues that she ultimately endorses materiality as potentially disruptive to the symbolic domain of viable bodies. This recasting of matter within her theory is shown as redefining the body as an active agent rather than a passive receptacle for regulatory norms. The essay examines this under-theorized aspect of her work, and illustrates that politicized abjection is as crucial to her philosophy as the notion of gender as performative.     

The global subject of precarity

ABSTRACT

This article explores the universalizing logic of precarity and precariousness in global studies discourse. Originally articulated in the work of Guy Standing and Judith Butler, this logic presupposes a possibility for a global politics of equality between precarious subjects in the North and South based on an emergent shared horizon of suffering. In a close reading of Standing and Butler, I challenge claims about equivalence by calling attention to the liberal analytics that inform their work. Drawing on a postcolonial attunement to historically constituted exclusions, I argue that precarity is better understood as a dis-ordering experience of sovereign subjectivity whose principal referent is the liberal not global subject of precarity. Globalizing the liberal subject of precarity entails the recuperation of its constitutive outside, namely the Third World, as the original site of abjection. The de-politicizing implications of attempts to universalize the subject of precarity are briefly outlined in conclusion.     

Andrii Liubka’s Carbide: Ukrainian democratic reforms through a dark glass

ABSTRACT

The Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine and its reforms are the topics of Andrii Liubka’s novel Karbid (Carbide, 2015). Employing Voltairean laughter and neo-Gothic aesthetics, Liubka presents the idea of European integration (one of the expected outcomes of the reforms) implemented practically by the corrupt elites of the imagined Transcarpathian town of Vedmediv as a money-laundering enterprise – an underground tunnel for smuggling drugs and people’s organs from Ukraine to Europe. The author proposes that the elites – most of whom are criminals – personify Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection in the novel and represent social spheres that need reform. Contrary to the Euromaidan goals, these comprador elites desire even stronger borders between Ukraine and the European Union, as these facilitate their shadow economy, and they subject the local population to economic and social decline, turning them into disposable human waste. By applying the concept of abjection in its psychoanalytic and social forms to Liubka’s tragicomic novel, the author argues that his text points to Ukraine’s struggle to define itself as “West” and shed its totalitarian legacy of the Soviet “East,” and brings attention to the conflict between the post-Euromaidan national strivings of Ukraine’s citizens and the rampant corruption that negates their efforts.     

Military Invasion and Women's Political Representation

The bodies produced by the violent practice of suicide bombing are a source of horror and disgust. They are, in feminist psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva's concept, abject: that which defies borders and is expelled to create the self. As ‘abject bodies’, suicide bombers' bodies frustrate attempts at calculation and rational control of security risks, and, in their mutilated flesh, expose as unstable the idea of the body as a whole with clearly defined boundaries between inside and outside. Female suicide bombers, whose bodies are already considered ‘abject’, produce a politics of the body that exceeds narratives of victimhood, and whose very monstrosity symbolically threatens the foundations of the nation-state. Attempts at constructing subjects out of the mutilated bodily remains of victims and perpetrators of suicide bombings are key practices in the production of the state and gendered subjects. The practice of suicide bombing and efforts to recover and resignify bodies reveals how power molds and constitutes the border of the body and state simultaneously. The explosive body of the suicide bomber thus has destabilizing effects beyond the motivations of its perpetrators and exposes the political work necessary to maintain the illusion of secure, bounded bodies and states.     

Foreign Women and Toilets

This article considers representations of migrant women who work as domestic help and probes the abjecting logic of cleaning practices vis-à-vis current issues of legality, illegality, immigration, transcultural difference, and rage. I survey diverse media depictions of foreign women and cleaning scenes in transnational settings: Fear and Trembling (2003), Maid in America (2004), The Ukrainian Cleaning Lady (2002 The Ukrainian Cleaning Lady (Pani Z Ukrainy) (documentary) (2002) Pawe? ?oziński (dir.), Poland [Google Scholar]), Dirt (2003 Dirt (film) (2003) Nancy Savoca (dir.), USA [Google Scholar]), and Friends with Money (2006). I examine the formation and apprehension of female “foreign” subjectivity in relation to cleaning for others, in relation to dirt. The visual analysis discusses ways in which removing other people's dirt by an immigrant, migrant, or a guest worker intertwines with gendered and racialized processes of social abjection. Privileging images of toilets and expressions of rage, my analysis inquires into a conceptual correspondence between garbage and the cultural renditions of foreign others; into ways in which the concept of “dirt” gets transposed onto the cleaners suggesting that those who clean dirt are themselves disposable bodies, only useful and tolerable as long as they cohere the messy lives of “legitimate” and properly “clean” natives.     

Constructing Girlhood: Abject Labour in Magazine Offices

Girls' magazines act as important texts through which meanings of childhood, girlhood and womanhood are mediated and constructed. However, previous research has focused on either the conditions of work practices or cultural production of the magazine as a product. Separately in each context women or girls have been described as abject. The paper will argue that employees working on girls' magazines experienced a simultaneous double abjection: in the gendered working practices and as an outcome of the construction of girlhood they produced. Two studies of all female teams producing teenage and pre‐teen magazines were used, including interviews and observations. Our approach engaged with the difficulty of examining abjectivity in working practices, as present but marginalized, silenced and othered. As a result of scrutinizing the gendered embodiment in these studies, the findings suggest there is a relation between the working practices and gendered cultural production, forming a process of abjection. This process was threefold: a marginalization of a particular gendered embodiment, the cracks or leaks where abjectivity became apparent and the silencing of those leaks. This study will be of value to scholars interested in gendered embodiment in workplaces, abjectivity and cultural production, noting the interrelation between these areas.     

认同与/于“卑贱”：萧红小说的性别、乡土与国族

纠结于女性经验、乡土意识与国族想象之间,萧红小说的性别叙事前后有别。其早期小说通过书写卑贱而祛除卑贱,从而汇流于左翼革命大叙事;而后期小说则摆脱启蒙现代性话语的束缚,最终认同于一个卑贱的乡土中国镜像——呼兰河。否认/承认卑贱、追求/抵抗现代性的矛盾辩证,贯穿于萧红创作始终,并映照出其作为一个左翼中国娜拉的宿命:"她们"在服膺于社会革命、妇女解放、民族国家等现代神话同时,也难以祛除对于庶民草根、女体肉身、乡土中国等卑贱物事的移情与认同。     

Common frailty,constructed oppression: tensions and debates on the subject of vulnerability

Vulnerability holds a contentious position in critical disability scholarship. Tension surrounding the notion of vulnerability lies primarily in its straddling of two areas of concern: the phenomenological reality of living with impairment, and the idea that vulnerability is a socially constructed entity that oppresses people with disabilities. This paper is an exploration of current and historical understandings of vulnerability, drawing from disability scholarship as well as from the theoretical tenets of Kristeva, Douglas, and Foucault. Tensions within the field are considered, as is the possibility that such debate might serve to enrich and deepen considerations of frailty in disability studies.