Abjection Incorporated

Maggie Hennefeld is Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and author of Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes.Nicholas Sammond is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto and author of Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation, also published by Duke University Press.

“Passionate, eye-opening, exciting! From Lena Dunham to Amy Schumer to Larry Clark and Louis C. K. (not to mention Mad Magazine), who would have thought that forty years after Kristeva's Powers of Horror so much insight for our times could be discovered through the lens of abjection! Editors Maggie Hennefeld and Nicholas Sammond have contributed to and guided the production of a timely and unusually cohesive anthology.” - Linda Williams, Professor Emerita, University of California, Berkeley “Abjection Incorporated makes a strong case for the abject as an important political space for confrontations between identities assigned and performed. Even as many seek to displace the subject as a meaningful category of analysis and action, these essays demonstrate that the fundamental tension between the fragility of self and the abjection of otherness remains a viable and quite possibly unavoidable foundation for cultural theory and criticism.” - Jeffrey Sconce, author of (The Technical Delusion: Electronics, Power, Insanity) “In an unique way, Abjection Incorporated makes a compelling argument about the concept of abjection as a useful tool to understand our peculiar existences in a sensory and irrational way.... [It] strongly advocates for a more nuanced perspective than the usual post-structuralist binary opposition of pleasure and violence....”- Éric Falardeau (Jump Cut) “Abjection Incorporated succeeds in offering its readers a significant tool that helps to explain social, political, and cultural forces at work.... [T]he subject matter alone provides an important timely theoretical framework that can help make better sense of the competing reality spheres that have come to dominate the discourse over our present moment.” - David Morton (Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television) “Comedy’s need to be miserable deeply complicates its relationship to power. Abjection Incorporated contributes essential scholarship to this historical and present problem.” - Will Schmenner (Studies in American Humor)

• Acknowledgments  viiIntroduction. Not It, or, The Abject Objection / Maggie Hennefeld and Nicholas Sammond  11. The Politics of Abjection / SylvÈre Lotringer  33Part I. Abject Performances: Subjectivity, Identity, Individuality2. Popular Abjection and Gendered Embodiment in South Korean Film Comedy / Michelle Cho  433. Precarious-Girl Comedy: Issa Rae, Lena Dunham, and Abjection Aesthetics / Rebecca Wanzo  644. Abject Feminism, Grotesque Comedy, and Apocalyptic Laughter on Inside Amy Schumer / Maggie Hennefeld  86Part II. Abject Bodies: Humans, Animals, Objects5. The Animal and the Animalistic: China's Late 1950s Socialist Satirical Comedy / Yiman Wang  1156. Anticolonial Folly and the Reversals of Repatriation / Rijuta Mehta  1407. Between Technology and Toy: The Talking Doll as Abject Artifact / Meredith A. Bak  1648. Absolute Dismemberment: The Burlesque Natural History of Georges Bataille / James Leo Cahill  1859. Why, an Abject Art / Mark Mulroney  208Part III. Abject Aesthetics: Structure, Form, System10. A Matter of Fluids: EC Comics and the Vernacular Abject / Nicholas Sammond  21711. Spit * Light * Spunk: Larry Clark, an Aesthetic of Frankness / Eugenie Brinkema  24312. A Series of Ugly Feelings: Fabulation and Abjection in Shōjo Manga / Thomas Lamarre  26813. Powers of Comedy, or, The Abject Dialectics of Louie / Rob King  291Contributors  321Index