The Picture of Abjection

Tina Chanter

Description

Articulates a groundbreaking theory of film relevant to gender, race, and class theory.

Tina Chanter resolves a fundamental problem in film theory by negotiating a middle path between "gaze theory" approaches to film and spectator studies or cultural theory approaches that emphasize the position of the viewer and thereby take account of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Chanter argues that abjection is the unthought ground of fetishistic theories. If the feminine has been the privileged excluded other of psychoanalytic theory, fueled by the myth of castration and the logic of disavowal, when fetishism is taken up by race theory, or cultural theory, the multiple and fluid registers of abjection are obscured. By mobilizing a theory of abjection, the book shows how the appeal to phallic, fetishistic theories continues to reify the hegemonic categories of race, class, sexuality, and gender, as if they stood as self-evident categories.

Contents
Introduction
1. Abjection as the Unthought Ground of Fetishism
2. Abjection as the Failure of Protection against Emptiness: Narcissism, Negation, and Klein's Projective Identification
3. Abject Art: Destabilizing the Drive for Purification, and Unmasking the Foundational Fantasy of Castration
4. Fantasy at a Distance: The Revolt of Abjection in Film
5. The Exotica-ization and Universalization of the Fetish, and the Naturalization of the Phallus: Abject Objections
6. Prohibiting Miscegenation and Homosexuality: The Birth of a Nation, Casablanca, and American History X
7. Abject Identifications in The Crying Game: The Mutual Implication of Transgender/Race/Nationalism/Class
8. The Fetishistic Temporality of Hegemonic Postcolonial Nationalist Narratives and the Traumatic Real of Abjection
9. Concluding Reflections on the Necrophilia of Fetishism

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Women's Studies
• Feminist
• Media Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Women
• Película fotográfica
• Philosophy
• Woman
• Feminism
• History of film
• Cinema
• The Women
• Film
• Media

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 11 janvier 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253027771
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE PICTURE OF ABJECTION: FILM, FETISH, AND THE NATURE OF DIFFERENCE
THE PICTURE OF ABJECTION
Film, Fetish, and the Nature of Difference
Tina Chanter
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA
http://iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 Orders by e-mail [e-mail]
© 2008 by Tina Chanter All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in anyform or by any means, electronic or mechanical, includingphotocopying and recording, or by any information storageand retrieval system, without permission in writing from thepublisher. The Association of American University Presses’Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exceptionto this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimumrequirements of American National Standard for InformationSciences–Permanence of Paper for Printed LibraryMaterials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chanter, Tina, 1960-
The picture of abjection : film, fetish, and the nature of difference / Tina Chanter. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-34917-0 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-21918-3 (pbk.)
1. Abjection in motion pictures. 2. Sex in motion pictures. I. Title.
PN1995.9.A25C43  2007
791. 43′6538—dc22 2007032952
 
1  2  3  4  5  13  12  11  10  09  08
Contents
Introduction
1.   Abjection as the Unthought Ground of Fetishism
2.   Abjection as the Failure of Protection against Emptiness: Narcissism, Negation, and Klein’s Projective Identification
3.   Abject Art: Destabilizing the Drive for Purification, and Unmasking the Foundational Fantasy of Castration
4.   Fantasy at a Distance: The Revolt of Abjection
5.   The Exotica -ization and Universalization of the Fetish, and the Naturalization of the Phallus: Abject Objections
6.   Prohibiting Miscegenation and Homosexuality: The Birth of a Nation, Casablanca, and American History X
7.   Abject Identifications in The Crying Game: The Mutual Implication of Transgender/Race/Nationalism/Class
8.   The Fetishistic Temporality of Hegemonic Postcolonial Nationalist Narratives and the Traumatic Real of Abjection
9.   Concluding Reflections on the Necrophilia of Fetishism
Notes
Bibliography
Index
THE PICTURE OF ABJECTION: FILM, FETISH, AND THE NATURE OF DIFFERENCE
I NTRODUCTION
A CLOSE-UP MIRROR IMAGE of a child carefully applying lipstick seduces theaudience into gendered assumptions that director Alain Berliner sets outto render unstable in Ma vie en rose . When Ludovic’s parents dismiss hiswearing his sister’s “princess” dress as a “joke,” their laughter deflects hisdeadly serious identification as a girl, yet not before both their newneighbors and the audience are offered the opportunity to be unwittinglycomplicit with Ludovic’s desire to identify as a girl. 1 The hetero-normativecausal lines that are usually assumed to operate amongbodies, gender, and desire are thereby momentarily suspended, beforebeing reenacted. The parents of Ludovic’s schoolmates petition to havehim removed from school, and his house is daubed with the words “bentboys out.” Forced out of their affluent, suburban neighborhood afterLudovic’s father loses his job, his family discovers that the causality thatrequires male bodies to underlie masculine genders and female bodiesto ground femininity is also constitutive of middle-class identity.
Identificatory regimes operate according to imaginaries that facilitateand support symbolic matrices in ways that remain inarticulate or invisibleto dominant representations. By effecting a momentary disruption ofsuch identificatory regimes, film can bring into relief alternative imaginaries,and in doing so can open up the possibility of transforming theterms in which dominant socio-symbolic representations construct identificationas normative. At the same time, film can expose the complicityamong dominant configurations of gender, sexuality, class, and race, suchas the way in which middle-class identity relies upon the causal implicationbetween a male body and masculinity. Gender assumptions arerevealed to be constitutive of class identity. They are part of the fabric thathelps to consolidate the image that the middle class projects of itself andimposes on those who fall short of it. When Ludovic fails to live upto these assumptions, he is effectively expelled from the community.Unable to tolerate the disorder that Ludovic represents, the communitythus strives to maintain intact the continuity between male bodies and masculine gender that Ludovic’s very existence challenges. ExcludingLudovic becomes a way of reasserting and consolidating the community’scoherence on the basis of gendered norms that prove to be constitutiveof its self-understanding.
The films with which this book is preoccupied enact the ways inwhich the social texts of gender, race, class, and sexuality constitute oneanother. The constitutive nature of social groupings is exposed throughprocesses, acts, and states of abjection. In particular, the fluidity of abjectionis revealed as the social fabric of hegemonic assumptions is torn andreconstituted. Subjects are abjected by identificatory regimes that precludethem or render them unintelligible. Striving to establish or maintaintheir integrity, subjects abandon others to abject states, often in anattempt to consolidate boundaries that are threatened. Yet abjectioncan also be taken up as a political strategy, given shape as a way ofprotesting and disrupting imaginaries that are sustained through the systematicexclusion of certain others. Subjects can be momentarily abjectedby undergoing the disruption of hegemonic identificatory regimes thatthey typically take to be stable and beyond question. Abjection can rendervisible an imaginary that remains for the most part invisible to groupswhose identity as subjects has been purchased in part at the cost of abjectingthose whose excluded status prevents them from appearing as subjects.Abjection can shore up the identities of some subjects as privilegedwhile effectively preventing other subjects from being able to constitutethemselves as subjects or from having their attempts to do so recognizedas such. Sometimes abjecting themselves in the service of ideologies, subjectsstrive to maintain symbolic systems of authority as cohesive. In theprocess, the legacy of exclusionary ideologies and practices is perpetuatedand reinvigorated.
One does not, of course, approach film empty-handed. We bringcertain assumptions to our cinematic viewing, assumptions that willsometimes be overturned in our viewing, in ways that might have morepermanent effects if we are ready to theorize our assumptions, and reflecton them in a way that makes them available to challenge, rendering uscapable of tracking the ways in which we are challenged aestheticallyor politically. We bring with us assumptions about the desirability ofrealism, for example, or the need for verisimilitude or the political salienceof film—or, conversely, its apolitical status. Film does not merely serve asan exemplification of theoretical insights, but rather as a medium thatcan sometimes reveal signifiance in excess of theory, just as theory canfunction, at times, in excess of film, indicating its lacunae, or helping usreflect critically on its trajectory. The relationship between film andtheory is explored here as one that is not so much dialectical as mutually constitutive, wherein theory can illuminate film; yet, equally, film canopen up, reorganize, challenge—reconstitute—theory, highlighting itsblind spots, foregrounding its limitations, contributing to, or expanding,its insights. Sometimes an organizing moment in the narrative filmsexplored here will confirm a theoretical stance, add substance or weightto it, and sometimes it will reach beyond theory, take theory further,add to it, or contest it.
Abjection renders problematic any assumption of the stability ofboundaries separating objects and subjects. Its moral charge is neitherinherently good nor inherently bad. While it is necessarily transgressive inthe sense that it does not respect the fixity of boundaries between selfand other, passive and active, private and public, or inside and outside,its transgressive character can be mobilized in the service of politicallyregressive or progressive forces. Abject moments can put into crisisimaginaries by exposing their instability. As such they can provide opportunitiesfor reworking identificatory mechanisms. The deferral and productionof abject moments in film can facilitate and disrupt identificationin ways that make available for reflection and interrogation the imaginaryoperations that we usually take to be indicative of who we are, of ouridentities and the identity of others. Equally, abject moments can be usedto shore up identities whose stability has been threatened in the wake ofbreaching boundaries that might have been assumed to be unassailable.
Any discourse that claims for itself a foundational status by exemptingfrom its orbit those it designates as other at the same time as appropriatingwhat it can from them conforms to the logic of abjection. Whetherthe language of appropriation is sexist, colonialist, or imperialist, meaningand value is established