Julia Kristeva (/ˈkrɪstəvə/; French: [kʁisteva]; born Yuliya Stoyanova Krasteva, Bulgarian: Юлия Стоянова Кръстева; on 24 June 1941) is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and novelist who has lived in France since the mid-1960s.

Kristeva went on to study at the University of Sofia, and while a postgraduate there obtained a research fellowship that enabled her to move to France in December 1965, when she was 24.

This process of separation is known as abjection, whereby the child must reject and move away from the mother in order to enter into the world of language, culture, meaning, and the social.

Slasher films thus provide a way for audience members to safely reenact the process of abjection by vicariously expelling and destroying the mother figure.

Kristeva's idea of the chora has been interpreted in several ways: as a reference to the uterus, as a metaphor for the relationship between the mother and child, and as the temporal period preceding the Mirror Stage.

In her essay Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini from Desire in Language (1980), Kristeva refers to the chora as a "non-expressive totality formed by drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated."

Furthermore, in her analysis of Oedipus, she claims that the speaking subject cannot exist on his/her own, but that he/she "stands on the fragile threshold as if stranded on account of an impossible demarcation" (Powers of Horror, p. 85).

[clarification needed] Kristeva has been regarded as a key proponent of French feminism together with Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray.

Kristeva proposed the idea of multiple sexual identities against the joined code [clarification needed] of "unified feminine language".

While the books maintain narrative suspense and develop a stylized surface, her readers also encounter ideas intrinsic to her theoretical projects.

[32] For her "innovative explorations of questions on the intersection of language, culture and literature", Kristeva was awarded the Holberg International Memorial Prize in 2004.

[36] Almond notes the absence of sophistication in Kristeva's remarks concerning the Muslim world and the dismissive terminology she uses to describe its culture and believers.

[37] He criticizes Kristeva's opposition which juxtaposes "Islamic societies" against "democracies where life is still fairly pleasant" by pointing out that Kristeva displays no awareness of the complex and nuanced debate ongoing among women theorists in the Muslim world, and that she does not refer to anything other than the Rushdie fatwa in dismissing the entire Muslim faith as "reactionary and persecutory".

[38] In Impostures intellectuelles (1997), physics professors Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont devote a chapter to Kristeva's use of mathematics in her early writings.

Under the People's Republic of Bulgaria, any Bulgarian who wanted to travel abroad had to apply for an exit visa and get an approval from the Ministry of Interior.

[50] Neal Ascherson wrote: "...the recent fuss about Julia Kristeva boils down to nothing much, although it has suited some to inflate it into a fearful scandal...

So she agreed to regular meetings over many years, in the course of which she seems to have told her handlers nothing more than gossip about Aragon, Bataille & Co. from the Left Bank cafés – stuff they could have read in Le Canard enchaîné... the combined intelligence value of its product and her reports was almost zero.