Longhurst + Grosz

Bodies: Exploring Fluid Boundaries

Robyn LonghursAccording to Longhurst, negotiating hegemonic discourses of geography means moving through and beyond these post-structural and postmodernist conceptualizations of bodies as sites of textual inscription. This is not to say Longhurst denies the discursive, political, and theoretical importance of theorists such as Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Rather, Longhurst allies herself with fellow feminist critical geographers with interests in theorizing a corporeal, messy material body - Rose and Elizabeth Grosz - thus privileging embodiment that does not "[take] flight from fluids and mess" (p. 133), which locates fluidity as a subversive borderline, liminal state. In thinking about fluids and corporeality, Longhurst also develops the thinking of both Grosz and Julia Kristeva around abjection. Abjection comes to mean exclusion and Other for Longhurst, the thing that is ugly, evacuated of pleasure, and disgusting in the face of more culturally desirable bodies in space. It is something that describes both an object and a zone. In this, disgust and desire are dialectically related, and in relation become a consideration that material bodies intentionally and unintentionally negotiate in spaces of cultural and social circulation. Abjection also allows Longhurst to set up the binaries she seeks to undermine and question in discourse: solid/fluid, mind/body, rational/irrational, public/private, concept/corporeal, male/female, desire/disgust, enunciation/ erasure.

Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 28, No 4 (2003)

from ~ http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/viewArticle/1394/1477