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It’s all about the “lower stratum” of the body and the actions of those parts-eating, fucking, shitting, vomiting, birthing, licking, pissing, you get it. The grotesque body is porous, protruding, exchanging matter with other bodies and the world around it.
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Plants with human faces, politicians with donkey bodies, dead people brought back to life, that kind of thing.įast forward to 1965 when Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian theorist whose name I’ve never spelled correctly on the first try, looked back at 15th century literature and saw how the body was portrayed in that context, creating a theory of grotesque realism and the grotesque body. For the uninitiated, grotesque is a visual art term that originated in the 15th century to denote the transgressing of nature’s laws. Kristeva is one of the heroines of my “grotesque feminism” writing endeavor, though, so I fought the urge to give up and inched my way through both Powers of Horror and Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Give up and glare at myself in the mirror while regretting my student loans challenging. Like, reread every sentence and then reread every page and still feel lost challenging. Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection is the most challenging thing I’ve ever read.