ABSTRACT
The analyses of Kristeva, Douglas and Cousins on the symbolic role of the abject, dirt and the ugly in relation to our body and society share commonalities and help explain how Bourgeois’s work was seen as a denial against existing conventions that critics – and, one could argue, bourgeois society as a whole – were not willing to change. Douglas indeed argued how purity should always be understood as an enemy of change.44 When applied to Louise Bourgeois’s work, this could suggest that the reluctance to accept it was not just a feeling of disgust for its impurity, but also a denial of change in a broader sense. Moreover, Douglas established an interesting relationship between what is identified as dirt and the formlessness of matter, which – according to various stages of differentiation – can imbue objects with a particular identity and thus be seen as dangerous and defiling. In Bourgeois’s work this seems to have clearly applied, in particular when her latex pieces gained a sense of identity through their abject materiality and shapelessness. But for Douglas the latter is also a ‘symbol of beginning and of growth as it is of decay’. As she states, ‘dirt shows itself as an apt symbol of creative formlessness’.45 In Bourgeois’s case this explains the expressive power of disgust in her latex work. This is
especially relevant for the synthetic neoplasms that I will discuss in Section III of this book.
