TITLE:
Transgressive Fiction: The Accuser Theory. Kristeva’s Abject Woman
AUTHORS:
Anja Housden-Brooks
KEYWORDS:
The Accuser Theory, Woman, Female Desire, Omni-Visual Pornography, Literary Discourse Analysis, Transgressive Fiction, The Transgressive Window, Abject, Sex-Buyer Ideology
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.11 No.11,
November
1,
2023
ABSTRACT: The Accuser Theory is the
term given post-millennial transgressive fiction set within discourses that
privilege male sexualized violence. To address this segment of the paper asks:
how does males’ sexualized violence construct woman in transgressive fiction
and how can she be radicalized in the current digitized era? This is answered
through a textual analysis of prominent transgressive novels from a late
Western capitalist context with an overall aim of radicalizing woman through
her undefinable sexuality. Bret Easton Ellis, Irvine Welsh and Chuck Palahniuk
write transgressive fiction which makes a socially relevant statement. Imperial
Bedrooms is focused upon in this paper through a deconstruction of his use
of woman as an object as a means for transgression through constructs of male
sexualized violence. Using the approach Critical Discourse Analysis through
close readings, the ways of seeing that shape woman in transgressive fiction
today become available. The immersion of digital media to unprecedented levels
has created a new sex industry which has impacted the human subject in profound
ways and directly informs woman. Van Dijk proved discourse structures prevalent
in society are revealed through the modal verb operators in each text, which
point to cultural obligatory ways of seeing, and can detect the presence of
ideology governing the lens in which the fiction is told. Locating woman in the
transgressive novels under study results from the constructs which emerge from
the rogue narrator’s use of taboo, which order her sexuality, and its
confrontation with death, the transformative trope, and thus reveals if
ideology is at play. By deep theories of transgression, it is possible to approach
these works as products of a new culture from deeper philosophical aspects.
Transgression has a limited
character and does not affect the stability of the taboo since it is its expected compliment. However, when the
literary articulation of death is present, transformation takes place,
promoting equality rather than hierarchy. Informed by a Western
twenty-first-century sex industry context, the classic theories are
re-historized to the present because of their perennial ability to engage taboo
and transgression, which are more visible today than ever. The changes to the
construction of woman across the turn of the century are highlighted to offer
greater contextualization to the transgressive literary landscape amidst shifts
in the articulation of the sex industry by big tech in the wider social sphere
to find woman’s inexorable sexuality.