Abjection and midwifery : towards a revision of Julia Kristeva's theory of the maternal

This paper will develop a specific reading of Julia Kristeva’s analysis of the Mother in psychoanalytic contexts and artistic production. I want to suggest a particular connection between the Mother and a second figure closely associated with her: the Midwife. Such a move opens up the possibility for a new understanding of Kristeva’s correlation of the Mother with the psychoanalytic concept of “abjection”. I wish to identify the Midwife as the crucial intersection of a masculine and feminine subjectivity. I will undertake this project via a historical study of Midwifery, which will include an exploration of the Midwife’s relationship to masculine ideologies of medical thought, as well as an account of the problematic rise of the “Man-Midwife”. My strategy will be to extend the submerged historical and material content of Kristeva’s own theories, with particular reference to Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.

Kristeva and an archaeology of sources and translation

Pinder examines Julia Kristeva's essay "Stabat Mater," a focus of psychoanalytical, historical and cultural concepts which require very careful consideration. In order to illustrate the complexity of these linguistic and cultural interrelationships, she looks first at Kristeva's own original essay in French to see what light her method of construction may throw on her particular ideas, then examines some translations of the essay into English to see if there is anything lost by attrition or gained by accretion.

Abject jurisdictions : CSI: Miami, globalisation and the body politic

This article argues that CSI: Miami disseminates two versions of politics, one of which replicates the conservative suppression of political debate in America post 9/11, and the other being founded in an understanding of the body as transgressive site of political activism. This second version of politics emerges out of Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection as a confusion of borders, which unsettles equally the discreteness of identity and the sense of order that subtends conservative politics. CSI: Miami can be multiply interrogated employing Kristeva's theory because the city it portrays, as well as the bodies inhabiting it, are both natured by an abject problematisation of borders. This paper explores the specifics of the portrayal of bodies in CSI: Miami, to suggest that abjection operates at the level both of discrete bodies and of the social domain of globalisation. In CSI: Miami, the political body becomes the body politic.

Kristevan aesthetics, performativity and the production of situated knowledge

In this paper, I will draw on the work of Julia Kristeva to argue that performativity can be understood in terms of a materialist ontology that underpins creative production and the knowing subject. To understand this, we need to examine the relationship between individual history, biology and culture and processes through which creative practice attributes value by translating psychic representations of affect and drive into verbal and visual signs. Kristeva's aesthetics does not plunge us into an obscure metaphysics, but provides a model for articulating material-discursive practices that emerge from corporeal responses. Enactments, predicated by desire give rise to agency and judgement allowing practice to test theory through the production of situated knowledge.

Kristeva's psychoanalytical position reveals the necessity of linking material and individual practices of art with the social through language and interpretation. Material-discursive practices can only acquire meaning through their relationship between the speaking subject and addressees. Art itself provides us with the means for discovering the knowledge it produces. In and through material practice, the work of art is capable of transferring back to the artist as viewer, structures of meaning that have hitherto been hidden. In practice, this involves a constant movement between the biological self (the self as 'other') and the social self, the ego. In artistic research, it can be said that the first addressee is the artist her/himself, as social other. Constant movement between the two in creative practice can thus be understood as a performative production of knowledge.

Exploratory surgery of the female psyche

The thesis explores the visual narrative concerning a journey of empowerment for women. To enable the journey to advance the inquiry is directed into two areas. The first area is female gender, which is argued to be socially constructed and implicit in the marginalisation of women in western society. The second area is ‘feminine authority’, which is gained by developing an understanding and acceptance of the characteristics which have historically been considered as belonging to the feminine. Granting these characteristics agency would recognise their authority and assist in the elevation of the female to a position of equality in western society. Beginning from a feminist position, the research supported the belief that the female is marginalised in western society. It also confirmed the notion that empowerment and authority can be attained by women if they actively pursue the following; • Explore their own psychology beyond the existing socially constructed gender roles. • Develop an understanding of their feminine self by applying Jung's theories on individuation and archetypes. • Expose the underlying patriarchal influence in western epistemology and science by challenging existing deeply held cultural and scientific beliefs and by actively contributing as feminists to the areas of epistemology and science. Archetypal myths of the ‘feminine’ have developed from an androcentric position. They enforce and perpetuate gender imbalance which contributes to the disenfranchisement of women in western society, ‘Individuation’ is a process in which a person explores aspects of themselves to bring forth parts of their unconscious into their conscious mind in an attempt to gain a deeper understanding of themselves. As a consequence the consciousness develops closer links with archetypal memories which assists the exploration. The ‘true feminine’ is the feminine not restricted or defined by the dominant androcentric view. Knowledge of the feminine empowers women to address the marginalisation of the female in western society and assists in the process of gaining female authority. This enquiry also investigated the four stages of female psychological development with regard to patriarchal influences. Of particular importance is the second stage of psychological development where the female identifies with historically perceived inferior characteristics of the female. This is when she rejects her connections with the primacy of female power and her deep connections with nature which were inherited from archaic times. It is at this stage that she absorbs the myths associated with western patriarchal society which effectively disempower her. Western epistemology, with its emphasis on ‘objective’ investigation and empiricism contributes to the support for and promotion of ‘inferior’ female gender. This type of investigation is brought into question when areas of research into primates and human evolutionary theory is shown to develop from an androcentric view. Western knowledge has associations with power and justice and power is commonly associated with dominance. Regard for ‘truth’ and ‘absolute’ can be viewed as key elements in the support for knowledge and its associations with power. Knowledge has historically maintained suppression of individual experience which promotes a universalised account. This suppression of beliefs other than the dominant authority maintains the existing dominant social structure. Foucault's view of the genderised or inscribed body alerts us to areas where dominance, resistance and power play a part in maximising masculine power and control. Gender becomes an instrument of power within the existing patriarchal structure. Gender, knowledge and power are identified as areas obstructing female empowerment. Part 3 of this exegesis examines the imagery which embodies the visual narrative. Particularly, the harlequin image, its historical background and connections with ancient mythology including reference to Jungian psychology. The harlequin image is developed sequentially in the earlier black and white drawings on paper. These drawings contained a female figure which was often placed in juxtaposition with a Venus or goddess image, reference was also made to ‘eve’ and the ‘siren’. These elements provided the framework which enabled the harlequin image to emerge and evolve. The narrative developed with an understanding of the ‘feminine’ aspects of the psyche which resulted in the harlequin acquiring the elevated authority of a goddess. The Harlequin evolved from my need for symbolic representation of the female psyche. It represents contradiction and dualism. It is a composition of opposites, reflects masculine and feminine traits, the dark and light of the conscious and unconscious mind, it houses both comic and sinister elements, is a trickster and menace. The costume, colours and patterns are expressive elements conducive to fragmentation and layering within the composition of the paintings. Jung examined the harlequin in Picasso's paintings. He concluded that as Picasso drew on his inner experiences the harlequin became important as a symbol; it was a pictorial representation from the unconscious psyche. It travelled freely from the conscious to the unconscious and represented the masculine and feminine, chthonian and apollonian. The final painting in the series, a triptych, completes the narrative and stands alone as a salutatory work. It unites the series by combining existing compositional devices and technique while making reference to imagery from previous works, ‘The Three Graces Victorious’, expresses the authority of the feminine. It completes a victorious stage of a journey where the harlequin is empowered by archaic memories and knowledge of the psyche. The feminine is hailed, elevated and venerated. Other elements which assist in expressing the visual narrative are; colour, technique and influence. Colour is explored and its use as an emotive devise in expressionism. Paul Klee's writing on the use of colour and it's symbolic meaning and Julia Kristeva's investigation on colour from a psychoanalytic and semiotic view are also discussed. To indicate influences and connections within my oeuvre, reference is also made to the following: Jasper Johns' for his use of imagery in his ‘Four Seasons’ series with it's reference to a journey of maturation and Louise Bourgeois' work which deals with issues of gender, memories and past journeys. Although ‘The Three Graces Victorious’; the concluding painting for the investigation is celebratory and represents a finality to the thesis, it points to further areas that impede feminine development and need future examination. Reference is made to a continuation of the exploratory journey by plotting the Harlequin/Goddesses future directions. Although the Harlequin/Goddess is empowered with newly acquired authority, her future journey does not need to be bound by mathematics or limited by rationality. She does not require power to dominate or gender structures to subjugate, but requires limitless boundaries and contexts. The Harlequin/Goddess's future journey is not fixed.

The aesthetic image : affect and the production of knowledge in practice-led research

This paper addresses the question of how we might provide practitioners with a framework for understanding how affect and aesthetic processes generate images that are implicated in the production of new knowledge in creative arts research. Drawing on the thought of Julia Kristeva, it examines the aesthetic underpinnings of discovery and the significance of this for research training and the development of more effective pedagogies both within and beyond the university.

Aesthetic experience and innovation in practice–led research

Within the context of ERA, this paper addresses the question of how we might provide practitioners with a framework for understanding creative arts research as the production of new knowledge. Drawing on the thought of Julia Kristeva, it examines the aesthetic underpinnings of discovery and the implications and significance of this for research training and the development of more effective pedagogies both within and beyond the university.
Kristeva’s work constitutes both an implicit and explicit critique of science allowing us to conceive of artistic research as an experiential and performative production of knowledge. As a mode of enquiry, artistic practice reveals the inextricable and necessary relationship between practice and theory, interpretation and making, art and life. This interrelationship underpins the aesthetic dimension of revolutionary practice and its production of unfamiliar or mutant forms of knowledge that is often difficult to grasp in terms of its capacity to engender social change and innovation. In the context of creative arts practice as research, the notion of experience-in-practice indicates that interpretation and analysis must fall to the practitioner-researcher, himself or herself, rather than to another person who has been external to the procedures of making, to trace the significant experiential, subjective and emergent processes involved in the production of the work that allows it to reveal the new. This is necessary if the generative and revolutionary impact of artistic research is to be fully understood in the wider research arena. In the final part of this paper, I will apply and illustrate these ideas through an analysis of a number of artistic research projects successfully completed in Australia.

Inaccurate autobiography – the ‘true-invention’ of a life

This paper takes the Aristotelian binary of praxis and poiesis and approaches the process of autobiography via its double lens. Drawing on a reading of Hannah Arendt done by Julia Kristeva, it considers the question of whether the activity (that is: praxis) of making-narrative might constitute an activity that is particularly ‘human’. It is framed by the playful and serious challenge offered by Derridean deconstruction to think two things at once, and to practice an inhabiting of binary ultimatums. Given this, it goes on to suggest that making in an autobiographical fashion, rather than involvinganythingprimarily representative or documentary, is more paradoxically akin to the invention of what is most true about that which we are in the habit of calling ‘our life’. Indeed, it can be argued that this praxisinvents that very ‘life’ – the latter being an entity or categorythat logically does not precede thesame writing that purports to describe it, but rather arises with its activity. This self-reflexivity (a manoeuvre that at once describes and invokes the very thing described) coincides with Derrida’s explication of invention’s mechanism.

Flash-floods : genre subversion and the abject erotic in Dorothy Porter’s The monkey’s mask and El Dorado

When discussing her verse novels, Dorothy Porter explicitly stated that she loved to ‘write bad’. This paper will argue that it was Porter’s engagement with the verse novel form and genre subversion, most notably seen with her detective and crime thriller verse novels The monkey’s mask and El Dorado, that allows for a destabilisation of traditionally established genre conventions, which in turn provide a narrative foundation for Porter’s use of abject erotic imagery.

In both The monkey’s mask and El Dorado there are several types of ‘bodies’ to be examined: the body of the verse narrative, the bodies of the characters subjected to crime, the body of poetry that is referred to as evidence, and the abject eroticised body. Extending upon the studies of Rose Lucas (1997) and Fleur Diamond (1999), this paper contends that it is Porter’s engagement with the abject erotic, as informed by Julia Kristeva’s (1982) theory of the abject and Johanna Blakley’s (1995) discussion of the abject in relation to eroticism, that allows Porter to subvert the phallocentric limitations upheld through the crime fiction genre and offer an alternative representation for lesbian sexuality and desire.

Poetic revolutionaries: intertextuality and subversion

Poetic Revolutionaries is an exploration of the relationship between radical textual practice, social critique and subversion. From an introduction considering recent debates regarding the cultural politics of intertextuality allied to avant-garde practice, the study proceeds to an exploration of texts by a range of writers for whom formal and poetic experimentation is allied to a subversive politics: Jean Genet, Monique Wittig, Angela Carter, Kathy Acker, Kathleen Mary Fallon, Kim Scott and Brian Castro. Drawing on theories of avant-garde practice, intertextuality, parody, representation, and performance such as those of Mikhaïl Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, Gérard Genette, Margaret A. Rose, Linda Hutcheon, Fredric Jameson, Ross Chambers and Judith Butler, these readings explore how a confluence of writing strategies – covering the structural, narratological, stylistic and scenographic – can work to boost a text’s subversive power.

Exploring subject positions and multiple temporalities through an Iranian migrant mother's family photograph albums

 In this article, I draw on a research study of one Iranian migrant mother's generation of selves through her material configuration of her personal photograph albums and through our verbal reading of her photographs. The research engages in a visual-material feminist ethnographic approach, and is informed by the work of Gillian Rose and the understanding that family photographs are a means by which women negotiate subject positions. In this article, I discuss an unexpected finding of my research, the significance of multiple temporalities in a migrant mother's production of selves. The photo album practices of the participant mother of this study, ‘Parvin’, depart from the common social convention of mothers arranging their photograph albums to chart family growth following the model of milestones occurring over linear developmental time. Parvin does not limit herself to linear developmental time, but rather she mixes up photographs in her post-migration family albums to generate multiple temporalities woven together by an enveloping ‘mixed’ time. Drawing on both Julia Kristeva and Homi Bhaba's theories of temporality and the subject, I suggest that Parvin produces subject positions for self and family through a continual interweaving of a multitude of pasts into the present and through a subsuming of milestones within cyclical family time. Further, I suggest that through her generation of multiple temporalities, Parvin produces the subject position of ‘accommodating mother’. Finally, I highlight the potential afforded by considering the temporal and the spatial together in studies of migrant identity.

Words and things: souvenirs of over-site/over-sight for place-making

This paper addresses the problem of making things in a given place (Qatar), and asks how anticipations and memories of place contribute to practice-based manoeuvres of place-making. Flying across time zones and travelling through sites suggests aspects of place-making that would draw upon both a notion of meteorites coming to earth and an awareness of the sensory consequences of global travelling. What this experience also suggests is an ‘over-sight’ (‘over-site’) in how travellers remember a place for themselves, and how they re-member it for others in the form of souvenirs. Going to a place might often default to an envisioning of pre-emptive or imaginary souvenirs in anticipation of the destination; thinking about what a place might be like is hard to separate from what we think we will eventually take away from it. Thus, the idea to be explored is how we might ‘make in to place’ as much as we ‘make something in-place,’ which perhaps results in ‘making some thing into a place’. Etymologically, souvenir already suggests this in its derivation from Old French: ‘to remember, come to mind.’ How does one ‘come to remembering’ in a place that, like all planetary places, will always be both global and local? Perhaps it depends on how one lands in a place…. Meteoroids remain in orbit around a place: nascent souvenirs always above the horizon, un-made place-makings. Meteors come closer to landing but still, by definition, burn up in the atmospheres of the new place. Meteorites, though, land: they suggest what we mean by the human element of ‘makings in-/to place.’ Travelling from somewhere, to somewhere yet to be fully determined, meteorites (people and/or words and/or senses) reflect the dispersion and compression of sensory (thing-based) and word-based experiences of place. Drawing on the work of Paul Hopper, Paul Carter, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Michel Serres, William Desmond and Julia Kristeva, the paper concludes that words evoke a place in which the present might take place, and that the senses evoke a present in which place might take place.

Writing “nhill” : the short story as still life

This chapter explores the philosophical, literary and practice-based elements that contributed to the writing by the author of a short story ('Nhill') and reflects upon how, as an example of creative-writing practice, the story contributes to Humanities-based research into issues of time, settlement, Aboriginality and post-coloniality. It works with theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva and Norman Bryson, as well as engaging with various painterly examples of Still Life. The possibility of a productive syncretism between Literature and Painting is proposed and extended.

Materiality, language and the prduction of knowledge art, subjectivity and Indigenous ontology

If ontology concerns theories of being, and epistemology theories of knowing, how might we bring the two together to account for movements between being and knowing that constitute cultural production? something occurs or lies behind language and meaning that must be acknowledged if we are to arrive at an explanation. In this essay, I examine some key ideas that emerge from the work of Julia Kristeva, as well as those of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on sensation and affect, to demonstrate how ontology and epistemology are inextricably entwined in knowledge production.1 Kristeva’s perspective of creative practice not only aligns with the new materialist acknowledgement of the agency of matter, but, in contrast to Deleuze and Guattari, it also affirms the dimension of human or subjective agency that is implicated in cultural production.