The Picture of Abjection: Film, Fetish, and the Nature of Difference

Tina Chanter resolves a fundamental problem in film theory by negotiating a middle path between gaze theory approaches to film and spectator studies or cultural theory approaches that emphasize the position of the viewer and thereby take account of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Chanter argues that abjection is the unthought ground of fetishistic theories. If the feminine has been the privileged excluded other of psychoanalytic theory, fueled by the myth of castration and the logic of disavowal, when fetishism is taken up by race theory, or cultural theory, the multiple and fluid registers of abjection are obscured. By mobilizing a theory of abjection, the book shows how the appeal to phallic, fetishistic theories continues to reify the hegemonic categories of race, class, sexuality, and gender, as if they stood as self-evident categories.

Author: Tina Chanter
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 01/11/2008
Pages: 392
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.22lbs
Size: 9.26h x 6.23w x 1.05d
ISBN: 9780253219183

About the Author

Tina Chanter is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University, Chicago. She is author of Ethics of Eros: Irigaray's Re-writing of the Philosophers, and Time, Death and the Feminine: Levinas with Heidegger, and editor of Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas.