Congealing the Abject

Abstract

Congealing the Abject: Blood in performance as feminine-feminist meaning-making by Laura Hartnell explores how blood – in three forms, three representations – evokes the abject in three Australian feminist performances. Through a performative exploration of Adena Jacobs' The Bacchae, Olivia Satchell's let bleeding girls lie, and Casey Jenkins' Casting Off My Womb, this paper explores blood as a tool for affectively engaging with women's bodies, grief, rage and trauma. Weaving together critical theory with autoethnographic accounts of being in-audience, written using performative writing, this paper explores how the representation of blood in performance ushers us into the feminine-feminist abject.

For Kristeva, the abject is a rejection of blood and other bodily waste and fluids and her reclamation of abjection is a defiant and celebratory journey into all that the masculine Symbolic has deemed too disgusting, horrific, excessive – too bodily – to confront. This paper argues that blood in performance ruptures the Symbolic order, plunging us into the abject and therefore into an affective, bodily state where meaning is primarily made not through language, logic, and reason, but through affective forces that push and pull, slip and slide, glisten and congeal, much like blood.

This feminine-feminist, abject form of meaning-making is inherently performative, and the performances explored in this paper demonstrate how blood in performance – forming a spectrum from the literal to the abstracted – opens a space within the masculine Symbolic order in which feminine-feminist meaning-making can emerge. By writing performatively about these performances, this paper aims to affectively evoke the ways in which blood 'congeals' the abject, offering us a place to explore bodily and embodied trauma, grief, rage through a feminine-feminist lens.

Notes

1 Judith Butler (1990) is one among many critics of Kristeva’s alignment of abjection with the maternal, positing that it reinforces the patriarchal hegemony she seeks to dismantle.