The Abject Space: its gifts and complaints

This article is based on a paper given at the 1998 Women's Studies Conferen ce 'Gendered Space: Women's Choices and Constraints' and argues that subjec tivity of the French feminist kind needs to inform discussions about women and the social, where assumptions of 'choice' are made. This notion is call ed into question by Kristeva (and Lacan) who insists that the subject is fo rmed in and through language. I also discuss private and public 'spaces', a rguing that the private is based upon the mother-child relation characteris ed, for Kristeva, by 'abjection' (filth, disorder, confusion, sin, etc.) as the child begins to separate and to move into the symbolic order. This pro cess, however, is never done once and for all. According to the four interviews analysed here, strong abjection of the mot her seems to be characteristic of aspiring, intellectual daughters, born sh ortly after the second world war, who demand gifts from, but are haunted by their debt to, the mother and the sphere of reproduction. Intellectual pro duction is necessary to their psychic survival in the face of this haunting but through their own analysis, therapy or the arts they struggle to becom e 'subjects in process', attempting to articulate the maternal within the s ymbolic.