Of American dreams and other unhomely nightmares:
Abjection, disgust, and the nation’s waste matters in Emer Martin’s Baby zero
Abstract
Drawing on feminist scholars Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, and Sara Ahmed, this article explores zones of abjection in relation to socio-geographic “waste-lands” in the US –“waste-lands” understood as territories populated by subjects rendered disposable in the nation’s purging of its “waste matters”. Employing Emer Martin’s novel Baby zero (2007) as a map orienting us across these terrains, the article examines how such spaces “become”, how they are constituted in and through abjection and, relatedly, disgust as affective reaction. I argue that in its depiction of Leila, a child migrant in the US, and her precarious dwelling in the House with No Anus as a radical zone of abjection, Baby zero offers a trenchant reflection on the necropolitics that characterize the ethos of neoliberal states and societies such as that of the US, ultimately mounting a sustained critique of its gendered and racialized nature and violent consequences.
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