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Abjection and the Constitutive Nature of Difference: Class Mourning in Margaret's Museum and Legitimating Myths of Innocence in Casablanca

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Tina Chanter
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Abstract

This essay examines the connections between ignorance and abjection. Chanter relates Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection to the mechanisms of division found in feminist theory, race theory, film theory, and cultural theory. The neglect of the co-constitutive relationships among such categories as gender, race, and class produces abjection. If those categories are treated as separate parts of a persons identity that merely interlock or intermesh, they are rendered invisible and unknowable even in the very discourses about them. Race thus becomes gender's unthought other, just as gender becomes the excluded other of race. Via an exploration of Margaret's Museum and Casablanca, the author shows why the various sexual, racial, and nationalist dynamics of the two films cannot be reduced to class or commodity fetishism, following Karl Marx, or psychoanalytic fetishism, following Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Whether they are crystallized in Marxist or Lacanian terms, fetishistic currencies of exchange are haunted by an imaginary populated by unthought, abject figures. Ejected from the systems of exchange consecrated as symbolic, fragmented, dislocated, diseased body parts inform and constitute meaning.

Type
Research Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 21 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Feminist Epistemologies of Ignorance , Summer 2006 , pp. 86 - 106
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 by Hypatia, Inc.

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