Editorial
1 Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature as well as contemporary film and TV-series, the contributions featured in Gender Disgussed: Gender and the Abject employ Kristeva's concept of abjection and the abject in order to analyze the gender politics and rhetorics of the texts with which they engage.
2 In a reading of selected essays and plays by Jean-Paul Sartre, Hedwig Fraunhofer's "Gender and the Abject in Sartre" illustrates the extent to which Sartre's othering of fascism and his patriarchal — misogynist and homophobic — rhetoric partake in the same dualistic ontology as fascism itself. By studying these texts against the backdrop of Theweleit's theorization of fascism and patriarchal systems and Kristeva's concept of abjection, Fraunhofer illustrates how Sartre's works reveal a fear of abjection, understood as a blurring of boundaries and a "contamination of the center," common to both fascism and patriarchal systems.
3 In "The Obscure Subject of Desire: Lucretia Borgia in Nineteenth-Century Literature," Martina Mittag discusses literary representations of Lucretia Borgia in works by Heinrich Heine, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Victor Hugo. Mittag shows how in presenting the female poisoner as abject, a monstrous non-subject challenging male subjecthood and the symbolic order, these and similar works form part of a development which she terms the "virtualization of the abject," and which allowed the nineteenth-century readership of sensationalist literature to scrutinize the monstrous from the secure position of an uninvolved observer.
4 Fintan Walsh's "The Erotics and Politics of Masochistic Self-Abjection in Jackass" analyzes the nexus between masochistic acts of self-abjection and masculinity. Walsh argues that to celebrate the Jackass series and movies as a carnivalesque manifestation of low culture is to oversee its failure to critique dominant discourses. Thus, in that the show emphasizes the performers' ability to survive and control the threats posed by the staged acts of (self-)abjection, figurative castration and penetration, Jackass ultimately serves to reinforce heteronormative masculinity and the belief in the existence of a stable male identity.
5 Gender Disgussed is completed by reviews of recent publications by Susan Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum (eds.) and Tina Campt.