Abjection Incorporated

“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)