Beyond Love and Death: Defining Abject Aesthetics in 1980s and 1990s Anglo-Canadian Cinema

Abstract

My doctoral thesis examines 1980s and 1990s Anglo-Canadian cinema, and introduces the concept of abject aesthetics to define the particular formal and narrative similarities between features produced in this time. This thesis is informed by the practices and theory of poststructuralism and psychoanalysis, and as the foundation of my thesis I rely on Julia Kristeva’s definition of the abject, as a place that disturbs “borders, systems, rules.” I locate these transgressions within the cinema of filmmakers such as Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg, Patricia Rozema, Lynne Stopkewich, Guy Maddin, Clement Virgo, Bruce McDonald, and Srinivas Krishna, in which sexuality and death are configured through degrees of neurotic fascination that define the cinema at this time. From this position, I investigate the arrival of the abject as a transgressive aesthetic that re-thinks the concept of the Self, and by extension, renegotiates the myths and ideals of Canadian identity. Abject aesthetics I define through two features: too many/ too few bodies, and the dissolution between reality and fantasy. In expanding on these concepts of abject aesthetics, I combine the works of theorists such as Steven Shaviro, Leo Bersani, Elizabeth Grosz, Kaja Silverman, Laura U. Marks, Tsvetan Todorov, to think through the relationship between the body, the look, the screen, and the imaginary. As such, I demonstrate the ways that Anglo-Canadian cinema in this time period expands upon concepts of gender, sexuality, the materiality of the body, identity, and nationalism, through the themes of love and death. While my work resides in the domain of the 1980s and 1990s, I offer abject aesthetics as an emergent area of critical investigation in Canadian cinema.