2. Abject Bodies in Society
First of all, there are countless different people in the world. Everyone has a different body shape, different eyes or skin color. Each individual is unique in its own way. Yet, there are some criteria existing which determine whether you fit in into social ideologies or not. First of all, it is important to underline and explain the existence and meaning of the abject itself. In her famous essay about the abject, Julia Kristeva QUELLE FEHLT comes across issues of how to actually define the abject, yet she says that she is “beset by abjection, the twisted braid of affects and thoughts I call by such a name does not have, properly speaking, a definable [object]” (1). As mentioned above, the abject is not easy to define, as
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I could enumerate many examples of what I take to be the abjection of bodies. We can notice it, for instance, with the killing of Lebanese refugees: the way that those bodies, those lives, don’t get figured as lives. They can get counted, there’s outrage generally, but there is no specificity. […] [W]e get a kind of differential production of the human or differential materialization of the human. And we also get […] a [production] of the abject. So it is not, as if the unthinkable, the unlivable, the unintelligible has no discursive life; it [does] have one. (Meijer, Costera, and Prins 281).
All in all, Butler explains the situation our social concepts retain. An abject body does not necessarily need to be a disabled person and thus unable to be accepted as a normal living person. It goes beyond just suffering disability or other visual, physical “damages”. Being an abject body in our society means having a life which is not considered being one. Becoming a subject matter instead of an object or vice versa, just because of the way of life we are