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Using Kristeva's theory of abjection, this article analyzes the psychosocial reality of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, advancing the understanding of exclusion and stigmatization as forms of social abjection.

The article applies abjection to understand how severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is both a medical emergency but also a cultural challenge. The analysis is structured in three dimensions: (1) the transgressive potential of the virus, (2) forms of cultural coping with its threat and (3) the moral order of abjection.

The virus is an existential challenge to cultural boundaries and subjectivity. Strategies to prevent its further spread (e.g. handwashing, “social distancing” and closing national borders) are thus culturally significant. The virus triggers the processes of abjection, (re-)establishing challenged boundaries and exclusionary social hierarchies. Collateral consequences of protective measures vary across regions and social groups, creating and exacerbating social inequalities.

Practices of abjecting the virus go far beyond handwashing, masking, etc. The virus, an invisible enemy to be expunged, is also a hybrid of threatening pathogen and human body; it is not the virus but people who experience exclusion, discrimination and disrespect. Thus, cultural sociology must address the moral economy of abjection.

As Kristeva insists, the abject threatens both the subject and the symbolic order. Overcoming social abjection means recognizing and strengthening individual and community agency and requires understanding vulnerability as an anthropological condition, enacting caring relationships and acting in solidarity.

This article demonstrates that abjection is a suitable theoretical tool for analyzing the social dynamics of the COVID-19 crisis.

The sexual and erotic dimensions inherent in leadership’s physicality impact on power dynamics within organizations but have been rendered largely invisible by current scholarship. In organizational practice, leadership is a masculine activity ideally carried out by male bodies, such that women’s leadership is still perceived as problematic. This suggests that the field is fearful of allowing sexual bodies to pollute what should be a functional, cognitive and instrumental activity. This chapter therefore draws on Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection to explain how and why the sexual body is positioned as the unspoken other of leadership. To do this, I explore the representation of two very contrasting leaders, Jean Luc Picard and the Borg Queen, in the popular film Star Trek: First Contact. The film illuminates how leadership ideally resides in a virile, mastered and distant male body. The sexual female body is represented as disgusting, dangerous, and a source of contamination and so must be cast out and destroyed. Finally, I ask whether the representation of the Borg Queen is useful as a transgressive means to undermine the abjection of the female leader’s body. However, I conclude that to counter abjection, scholars of leadership need instead to build discursive and material practices that revalue the feminine and respect the alterity of self and others.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the monstrous in organizational diversity by introducing the concept of cultural anthropophagy to the diversity literature. Using Kristeva's notion of abjection to better understand cultural anthropophagy, the paper argues that cultural anthropophages cross boundaries, and build identity through desire for and aggression toward valued others.

The paper uses a conceptual discussion of abjection, along with a historical survey of anthropophagic approaches from Brazilian art and cultural studies.

Anthropophagic approaches highlight unique features of organizational identity, framing identity formation as a fluid process of expulsion and re-integration of the other. While abjection approaches focus on the exclusion of material aspects of the self and the formation of self-other boundaries, anthropophagy focusses on the re-integration of the other into the self, in a symbolic gesture of re-integration, desire, and reverence for the other.

The idea of anthropophagy is a recent entrant into the organizational literature, and the close relation between anthropophagy and abjection is illuminated in the current paper. Original insights regarding the search for positive identity, the ambivalence of self and other, and the relation of the particular and the universal, are offered with regards to the diversity literature.

This paper furnishes an inaugural reading of abjective consumption by drawing on Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory of abjection within the wider terrain of consumer cultural research. It offers a conceptual framework that rests on three pillars, viz. irrationality, meaninglessness, dissolution of selfhood.

Qualitative research design that adopts a documentary ethnographic approach, by drawing on a corpus of 50 documentary episodes from the TV series “My Strange Addiction” and “Freaky Eaters”.

The findings from this analysis point to different orders of mediatized discourse that are simultaneously operative in different actors’ frames (e.g. moralizing, medical), in Goffman’s terms, yet none of which attains to address the phenomenon of abjective consumption to its full-blown extent.

Although some degree of bias is bound to be inherent in the data because of their pre-recorded status, they are particularly useful not in the least because this is a “difficult sample” in qualitative methodological terms.

The multi-order dimensionalization of abjective consumption opens up new vistas to marketers in terms of adding novel dimensions to the message structure of their communicative programs, in line with the three Lacanian orders.

The adoption of a consumer psychoanalytic perspective allows significant others to fully dimensionalize the behavior of abjective consumption subjects, by becoming sensitive to other than symbolic aspects that are endemic in consumer behavior.

This paper contributes to the extant consumer cultural research literature by furnishing the novel conceptual framework of abjective consumption, as a further elaboration of my consumer psychoanalytic approach to jouissance consumption, as well as by contrasting this interpretive frame vis-à-vis dominant discursive regimes.

Since 2004, Turkish cinema has been witnessing an emergence of horror genre, now flooded with stories of possession by malevolent jinn, as transgressive, volatile figures of abjection. These female-centred narratives rely both on Islamic cosmology and myths and folktales of pre-Islamic Anatolian oral culture. The chapter will first explore the reasons horror has been neglected in the century-long history of cinema in Turkey and move on to highlight the socio-economic, cultural, and political contexts that were catalysts for the horror genre’s emergence. Then, the chapter will discuss the codes and conventions of the genre and explore the unique place of Alper Mestçi’s 2007 film Haunted (Musallat), among its contemporaries in terms of the ways in which the film challenges these established codes and conventions. In analysing Haunted, the chapter will use the theoretical framework of Barbara Creed, Carol J. Clover and Julia Kristeva to discuss the monstrous-feminine and masculinity as abjection.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate a group of Romanian injecting substance users “migrating” from heroin to novel psychoactive substances (NPS) as a counterpublic seeking to escape the stigma of drug abjection.

The findings are drawn from interview and observational data collected mainly at drug services sites in Bucharest, Romania.

The stimulant powders sold by head shops appealed to experienced drug users because they seemed to emulate a consumerist ethos and cultivate a healthy, rational agent that popular discourses of addiction deem incompatible with drug careers. NPS and head shops were thus initially understood as a possibility of escaping “junk identities”. However, they ultimately sealed injectors as abject bodies that obstructed the collaborative goals of rehabilitation and health restoration. A sense of symbolic distance shaped by notions of moral and bodily hygiene separated heroin and NPS users, as the latter increasingly came to be seen and see themselves as flawed consumers of health and freedom.

NPS retail spaces could present valuable opportunities to insert harm-reduction resources and harness counterpublic health strategies.

Dominant definitions of substance use as unavoidable paths into self-destruction push users towards unknown compounds they can attach more fluid meanings to. This suggests that prohibitionist language still obscures rational dialogue about existing and emerging drugs.

The paper traces ATS/NPS in an Eastern European context offering an alternative vantage point to harm-focused perspectives.