Editorial

Feminist theory often conceptualizes the skin as a critical threshold—an interface that delineates the body’s formal boundaries while simultaneously remaining vulnerable to disruption, transgression, and (re-)inscription. In this view, the body’s border is not merely a static surface but a dynamic site where the self constantly negotiates its relation to the other. This operation manifests as a visceral reaction when we are confronted with materials and sensations that threaten the imagined closedness of the body and thus its autonomy: the skin on heated milk when it coats our lips and bunches up against them; the fat blowfly scurrying across someone’s cheek; the wet blob of open flesh peeking out from under scrubs. A sensation of dread runs through the body—some mixture of aversion, disgust, fear—perhaps causing a shiver, a furrowed brow, a wrinkled-up nose. A difference is established: these sights and sensations are expelled from any relation to the self to uphold its borders. Bulgarian-French psychoanalyst and literary theorist Julia Kristeva conceptualizes this visceral mechanism as abjection: the process in which the subject is constituted by violently splitting off that which is made to not be the subject; “a revolt against that which is in us that is opposed to I,”¹ such as bodily fluids, sheddings, waste, corpses, and other liminal entities that blur the line between subject and object—the abject. Unlike repression, which functions at the level of the unconscious, abjection is an affective reaction marked by revulsion, repugnance, and fright, that both sustains and destabilizes the subject’s formation.²

At its core, abjection reveals the paradox of identity. The subject must reject and cast off that which reminds it of its own fragility, dependence, or animality, in order to claim coherence and autonomy. Yet, in doing so, the abject remains persistently near, haunting the borders of the self. This uneasy proximity renders the abject a site of both psychic threat and fascination—particularly potent in contexts involving the body, sexuality, gender, race, and (dis-)ability, as the concept encompasses culturally constructed difference.

“[It is] not lack of cleanliness or health that causes ‘abjection,’ but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”³

As such, abjection reacts to a looming breakdown in the meaning needed to maintain subjectivity and social relations, triggered by a loss of the distinction between subject and object, self and other. The analysis of the underlying political dimensions of these distinctions then lends perspective to how othering is embodied, i. e. how political dehumanization and alienation are assumed. At the current moment, these are particularly virulent in the right-wing seizure of migratory rights, bio-, and necropolitics. This key proposition in French feminist thought thus offers a lens through which to interrogate the precarious and ideologically charged boundaries of subjectivity, corporeality, and social order.

Following its publication in 1980 and its English translation in 1982, Kristeva’s theory of abjection became a critical touchstone for art historical and critical discourse, particularly within the anglophone anti-aesthetic debates of the 1980s and 1990s. As Hal Foster notes, artists utilized two strategies regarding abjection: either identifying with the abject and its subversive potential, or evoking the operation of abjection to make it reflexive.⁴ Blurring the lines of the ‘designated’ body and exposing gendered concepts of what Kristeva deems the “clean and proper body,”⁵ works such as Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll (1975), Andres Serrano’s Blood Semen III (1990), and Sarah Lucas’ Chicken Knickers (1997) are exemplary for how abjection is engaged in contemporary positions.⁶ As a concept that is anchored in the socio-cultural specifics of a given time, abjection however remains an interpretative, non-universal discursive operation, carrying the inherent dualistic dynamism of transgression: without delineation, there is no subversion, and vice versa. Arguably, Serrano’s work Piss Christ (1987) is completed precisely by conservative US senator Jesse Helms’ outrage over it.⁷

As for the political efficacy of abject art, Foster suggests that the artificiality of the abject can counteract fascist tendencies within the modern subject by confronting its fear of otherness.⁸ He further posits that this line of inquiry solves a central contradiction in contemporary methodology by uniting the deconstructionist approach to subjectivity with the lens of individually specified (and politically significant) identity. However, a main point of criticism, apart from institutional co-optation, remains that museality affords a mode of perception to the viewers that differs significantly from experiencing abjection in ‘reality,’ offering a mental distance.⁹ The fifth issue of re:visions invites readers to explore the artistic and critical potential of this psychological moment as per Kristeva’s hallmark theorization anew along the following contributions engaging with its theoretical legacy.

In Durchlässige Körper: Schmerzgrenzen und ihre Überschreitung bei Florentina Holzinger, Claudia Redka surveys the material and cultural permeability of bodies in Florentina Holzinger’s postdramatic theater as both venues of oppression and self-empowerment. Laden with corporeal narration, abject configurations, and oscillating power relations, Holzinger’s stage praxis abolishes the separation of the body from language in order to return both painful and pleasurable corporeality—specifically what is banished as abject–to the intellectual realm. Departing from Kristeva, Redka consults neighboring frameworks of affect theory and new materialism. Finally, the stakes of staging the abject in the specific context of theater are contemplated.

In her essay Von verkörperter Kritik und strukturierter Scheiße: Mike Kelley und die Komödie der Kunstkritik der 1990er Jahre, Sophia Roxane Rohwetter shows how through his artworks, Mike Kelley exposes and mocks the relationship between artist and critic. Rohwetter embeds this analysis in the wider context of the two competing interpretations of the abject that faced each other in the 1990s: On the one hand, a content-centered understanding of the abject following Kristeva’s theory, and on the other, the informe as a formalist-structural approach that traces back to unpublished writings by Georges Bataille and was explored in the exhibition L’informe: mode d’emploi (1996) at the Centre Pompidou as well as through writings by critics like Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, prominently published in the journal October.

Considering the fleshy, waxen topographies of sculptor Anat Homm, from chronicling their genesis in the artist’s studio to situating them within broader art historical lineages, Anne Diestelkamp and Leonie Rösler illuminate the affective terrains that edge on abjection: pain, revulsion, and the uneasy pleasures that surface in their wake. In this portrait, the authors move with precision through Homm’s process. Wax is molten and poured to form membranes, yielding layers of skin that are peeled back, punctured, folded inward. Engaging Kristeva’s theory of the abject and drawing on the work of Kiki Smith, Georges Didi-Huberman, and the anatomical wax traditions of 18th-century Florence, Diestelkamp and Rösler reflect on the act of unmaking the body through skin: its most tender threshold.

In the interview Scream-And-Laughter Infection at the Cinema! A Conversation with Eli Lewy and Sara Neidorf, Directors of the Final Girls Berlin Film Festival by Clara Thym, Eli Lewy and Sara Neidorf reflect on the political and societal power of horror films. Their festival—which celebrated its 10th edition this year at City Kino Wedding—spotlights feminist and queer perspectives in the genre, challenging dominant narratives through subversive storytelling. As they show, horror’s effectiveness lies in its visceral impact: by confronting audiences with the abject, it provokes intense bodily reactions that create space for emotional release and critical reflection.

Departing from Mariana Enriquez’s novel Bajar es lo peor (1995) and Juan Sebastián Torales’s film Almamula (2023), Estela Braun Carrasco examines the intersection of queer identities and the horror genre in post-authoritarian Argentina, focusing on how these narratives confront the haunting legacies of state violence and social repression. Drawing on Kristeva’s psychoanalytic concept of abjection, she analyzes how queer bodies inhabit a liminal social and psychological space—neither fully expelled nor assimilated by dominant culture—thereby destabilizing hegemonial histories and articulating alternative modes of memory and belonging.

Focusing on works by Mona Hatoum and VALIE EXPORT, Malin Krahn examines how medical visualization tools can change our perception of the body as an integrated whole in her essay Turned Inside Out: On the Interplay Between Medical Visualization Tools in Art and the Abject Body. By revealing the body from within and collapsing the boundaries between its interior and exterior, self and other, these technologies render it fragmented, penetrable, and unfamiliar. The text draws on the concept of abjection to show how this unsettling imagery challenges normative representations and exposes the body’s vulnerability and political entanglements.

In her essay In the Folds: Notes on Clothing and Abjection in the Work of Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, Franziska Blume explores the relationship between clothing and abjection through an analysis of the Mexican artist’s installations and textile creations. Focusing on Sanchéz-Kane’s deconstructionist take on uniforms and garments, Blume reflects on how clothing can undermine the notion of self-contained identity and subjectivity. By no longer shaping the body but destabilising its boundaries, garments in Sanchéz-Kane’s practice appear as agents of abjection, unsettling stable selfhood.

Noemy Macari, Kat Ripea, and Johanna Siegler

Berlin, May 2025

1 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (Columbia University Press, 1982), 1.
2 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 9-10: “[A]bjection itself is a composite of judgment and affect, [...] maintaining that night in which the outline of the signified thing vanishes and where only the imponderable affect is carried out.”
3 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.
4 Hal Foster, “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” October, no. 78 (Autumn 1996), 115-16.
5 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 71.
6 A defining moment in the critical and art historical ascent of the Kristevan abject was the Whitney Museum’s 1993 exhibition Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art, which not only institutionalized the term, but also positioned the abject as a tool of critique in the ongoing dialogue around the boundaries of disgust, desire, and cultural norms. Without taking the shape of any particular art movement, the categorization of ‘abject art’ remains largely defined by this and other exhibition projects of the 1990s.
7 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (MIT Press, 1996), 157.
8 Foster, The Return of the Real, 210.
9 Anja Zimmermann, “‘Everything was very neat’: Abject Art zwischen Kunstgeschichte und Politik,” cult.psych., no. 2 (2021): 12-14, https://doi.org/10.1007/s43638-021-00022-y.

Contributions by
Pauline Barnhusen
Franziska Blume
Estela Braun Carrasco
Anne Diestelkamp
Frederieke Henk
Malin Cäcilie Krahn
Noemy Macari
Mariia Ostapkevich
Konstantin Raftl
Claudia Redka
Kat Ripea
Leonie Rösler
Sophia Roxane Rohwetter
Johanna Siegler
Clara Thym

Editors
Laura Arda
Pauline Barnhusen
Lucia Braemer
Annalisa Giacinti
Josefin Granetoft
Carolin Greifenstein
Devin Gökdemir
Frederieke Henk
Malin Cäcilie Krahn
Noemy Macari
Luise Mörke
Justine Ney
Mariia Ostapkevich
Kat Ripea
Johanna Siegler
Clara Thym
Stefanie Unternährer

Managing Editor
Stefanie Unternährer

Coordination
Janna Erdmann

Copy Editors
Pauline Barnhusen
Carolin Greifenstein
Tim Lingk
Mariia Ostapkevich
Kat Ripea

Design issue #5
Anna Hadaier

Website
Julia Grüßing
Jérémy Landes

Social media
Janna Erdmann

Cover image
Anat Homm. Foto:
Anna Hadaier

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Editorial