Other studies have shown how people and practices can also be understood through abjection (Valentine 1998). The abject, though, is not limited to objects.
For example, in a study of waste in Oaxaca, Mexico, geographer, Sarah Moore shows how residents of a neglected neighborhood blocked flows of trash to draw attention to their socio-spatial exclusions and resulting inequality (Moore 2008). In studies of garbage, discards, or any kind of material waste, abjection is often used to understand how these things become the mediators of socio-cultural and spatial inclusions, exclusions, and difference. Geographers and other social scientists studying waste and its relation to issues of social and environmental justice have used abjection to consider how objects, people, and practices are tagged as dirty and subsequently marginalized (Moore 2009). The defining quality of the abject, then, is not an essential trait that elicits feelings of disgust or horror, but rather anything that muddles normative borders and divisions and thus threatens a breakdown in conventional or dichotomous ways of making meaning of the world. This continual insistence of the abject is not just about negation but comes to be a productive process through which prohibitions, taboos, and boundaries are established or contested: it defines the contours of the body and the body politic. Abjection theorists ask how that which we attempt to radically exclude constantly returns. This uneasy relationship often causes meaning to break down in this break down, the fragility of normative orders are exposed.Īs such, while abject objects, populations, and practices are commonly thought of as absolutely excluded from normative and sanitized orderings of the body, the household, the city, and the nation, theorists of abjection point to the impossibility of permanently excluding the abject (Sibley 2005 McClintock 1995 Moore 2009 Popke 2001). Studying waste through abjection means beingcognizant of the ways in which something beyond meaning (the extra discursive) is continually influential in how we make meaning. Thus, the abject resides in the liminal space between that which is expressible through language and that which radically resists expression. In that way, abjection is set in motion whenever we try to make meaning of the world and ourselves. Abjection is therefore caught in up in the production of the boundaries of peoples’ bodies, societal norms, and the self.
Furthering the insight of Douglas that dirt is not an essential characteristic of objects but is produced through its ambiguity and its subsequent inability to be assimilated into existing socio-cultural categories and systems, Kristeva explains how the constant process of keeping the unclassifiable at bay is a productive act. While abjection theory has been used in various ways across the social sciences and humanities, it emerges from the psychoanalytic work of Julia Kristeva.ĭrawing on a seminal text in Discard Studies, Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger (1966), Julia Kristeva’s foundational book The Powers of Horror (1982) develops the theory of abjection through literary, psychoanalytic, and anthropological works. The Discard Studies Compendium is a project by Max Liboiron, Michele Acuto, and Robin Nagle. This project is currenlty on hold.Ībjection describes a social and psychological process by which things like garbage, sewage, corpses and rotting food elicit powerful emotional responses like horror and disgust. This online version of the Compendium is the initial step of a larger project that aims to create a print version with a comprehensive list of terms. The greyed out terms in the chart are a small sample of an expanded future list. Waste and pollution are the material externalities of complex cultural, economic, and political systems, and solutions need to address these wider systems rather than fall to technological or moral fixes that deal with symptoms rather than origins of problems. Our task is to trouble the assumptions, premises and popular mythologies of waste. This list is critical in the sense that it comes out of methods in the humanities and social sciences that contextualize the problems and systems that are not readily apparent to the invested but casual observer. The Discard Studies Compendium is a list of critical key terms. In the past few years there has been both a resurgence of approaches to studying waste and wasting as well as an interest in the potential of waste to build interdisciplinary bridges of relevance to pressing questions of our time.
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