The Abject Body

Virtually all horror texts represent the monstrous-feminine in relation to Kristeva's notion of maternal authority and the mapping of the self's clean and proper body. Images of blood, vomit, pus, shit, etc., are central to our culturally/socially constructed notions of the horrific. They signify a split between two orders: the maternal authority and the law of the father. On the one hand these images of bodily wastes threaten a subject that is already constituted, in relation to the symbolic as 'whole and proper'. Consequently, they fill the subject- both the protagonist in the text and the spectator in the cinema- with disgust and loathing. On the other hand they also point back to a time when a 'fusion between mother and nature' existed: when bodily wastes, while set apart from the body, were not seen as objects of embarrassment and shame.

Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. (London & New York: Routledge, 1993), 13.

The ultimate in abjection is the corpse. The body protects itself from bodily wastes such as shit, blood, urine and pus by ejecting these things from the body just as it expels food that, for whatever reason, the subject finds loathsome. The body ejects these substances, at the same time extricating itself from them and from the place where they fall, so that it may continue to live:

"Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit-cadere, cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel. 'I' is expelled."

Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. (London & New York: Routledge, 1993), 9, citing Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 3-4.