[2] Kristeva's concept of abjection is used commonly to analyze popular cultural narratives of horror, and discriminatory behavior manifesting in misogyny, homophobia and genocide.
"[8] Since the abject is situated outside the symbolic order, being forced to face it is an inherently traumatic experience, as with the repulsion presented by confrontation with filth, waste, or a corpse – an object which is violently cast out of the cultural world, having once been a subject.
From a deconstruction of sexual discourses and gender history Ian McCormick has outlined the recurring links between pleasurable transgressive desire, deviant categories of behaviour and responses to body fluids in 18th and 19th-century discussions of prostitution, sodomy, and masturbation (self-pollution, impurity, uncleanness).
[citation needed] Organizational theory literature on abjection has attempted to illuminate various ways in which institutions come to silence, exclude or disavow feelings, practices, groups or discourses within the workplace.
Studies have examined and demonstrated the manner in which people adopt roles, identities and discourses to avoid the consequences of social and organizational abjection.
One such method is that of "collective instruction," which refers to a strategy often used to defer, render abject and hide the inconvenient "dark side" of the organization, keeping it away from view through corporate forces.
Through the controlled release of information and belief or reactionary statements, people are gradually exposed to a firm's persuasive interpretation of an event or circumstance, that could have been considered abject.
The interpersonal consequences that result from this are either that the person with a disability is denied and treated as an 'other' – an object that can be ignored – or that the individual is clearly identified and defined as a deject.
Bruan Seu demonstrated the critical importance of bringing together Foucauldian ideas of self-surveillance and positioning in discourse with a psychodynamic theorization in order to grasp the full significance of psychological impactors, such as shame.
The role of the other has become increasingly significant to developmental theories in contemporary psychoanalysis, and is very evident in body image as it is formed through identification, projection and introjection.
Those individuals with BDD consider a part of their body unattractive or unwanted, and this belief is exacerbated by shame and the impression that others notice and negatively perceive the supposed physical flaw, which creates a cycle.
The Tate defines abject art as that which "explore themes that transgress and threaten our sense of cleanliness and propriety, particularly referencing the body and bodily functions.
[33][34] It was preceded by the films and performances of the Viennese actionists, in particular, Hermann Nitsch, whose interest in Schwitter's idea of a gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) led to his setting up the radical theatre group, known as the Orgien-Mysterien-Theater.
In the 1980s and 1990s, fascination with the Powers of Horror, the title of a book by Julia Kristeva, led to a second wave of radical performance artists working with bodily fluids including Ron Athey, Franko B, Lennie Lee and Kira O' Reilly.
[36] Other artists working with abjection include New York photographers, Joel Peter Witkin, whose book Love and Redemption and Andres Serrano whose piece entitled Piss Christ caused a scandal in 1989.