Reclaiming Abjection: The Female Body in Contemporary Art

Abstract

This dissertation examines the role of abjection within contemporary female art, arguing that abjection functions as a critical feminist methodology through which women reclaim autonomy over their bodies. Drawing on various perspectives of psychoanalytic and feminist theory, particularly Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection from her book Powers of Horror (1980) and Luce Irigaray’s collection of essays titled Speculum of the Other Woman (1974) that explores how the female experience is shaped by symbolic systems, the study explores how the female body has been culturally regulated through ideals of purity, containment and control.

Through visual and contextual analysis, this dissertation considers how contemporary female artists engage with abject materials and processes, including the maternal body, bodily fluids and decay. The chapters are structured to reflect a chronology of embodied female experience, beginning from the maternal relationship, through bodily fluid as a marker of physical and emotional development, to decay as an inevitable condition of embodiment. Works by Carolee Schneemann, Helen Chadwick, Yapci Ramos, Poppy Jackson and Anya Gallaccio are analysed to demonstrate how abjection is not simply presented for shock value, but is used deliberately to challenge the shame and repression imposed on female bodies.

The study argues that by making abjection visible, these artists resist the cultural expectation that women distance themselves from their own bodily processes. In doing so, contemporary female art reclaims abjection as a site of liberation rather than dysfunction, asserting the female body and its functions as something that can exist without censorship.