ABSTRACT
The human body, Mary Douglas writes, “is a model which can stand for any bounded system” (1966: 115). As her comment reflects, a society’s perceptions of bodily space play a key role in its spatial perceptions generally and in the social constructions metaphorically erected upon such perceptions. The human body has traditionally functioned as a paradigmatic metaphor for society, for the body social.1 This usage is problematic, however, because the human body in reality is not a body; it is not securely contained or sealed off; its boundaries do not hold. Julia Kristeva’s study of the horror associated with “the abject” – all that issues, leaks and flows out from the body – focuses on this reality and its subversion for symbolic uses of the body to denote bounded systems (Kristeva 1982: 102).Working fromMaryDouglas’ premise that disgust is caused by “matter out of context” (Douglas 1966: 36), Kristeva offers that nothing about the body is intrinsically dirty or defiling. What causes humans to react with horror at the abject is not its inherent filth, “but what disturbs identity, system, order.What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (Kristeva 1982: 4). As Douglas suggests, we are disgusted by food caught in a mustache or shoes on a table, but food and shoes are innocuous in their proper place, in a dish or on the floor. Disgust is a reaction to disrupted boundaries.
