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  • An Other Kind of Home: Gender-Sexual Abjection, Subjectivity, and the Uncanny in Literature and Film by Kyle Frackman
  • Anjeana K. Hans
Kyle Frackman. An Other Kind of Home: Gender-Sexual Abjection, Subjectivity, and the Uncanny in Literature and Film. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2015. 181pp. US$42.95 (Hardcover). ISBN 978-3-631-62837-9.

Kyle Frackman’s An Other Kind of Home is a compelling study of “spatial and temporal othering” (11), of the ways in which the other is figured particularly in terms of gender and sexuality, and how this construction relates to notions of home and belonging. Focusing on a play, a novel, and two films, Frackman’s analysis situates each of these primary texts as points of entry into a broad understanding of abjection and its connection to a range of identity categories that, while focused on gender and sexuality, expand to include class, nationality, ethnicity, and disease.

Frackman begins by examining the key terms of his analysis. This theoretical framework is wide-ranging, and Frackman admirably defines some of the central terms in ways that he then expands on in his individual analyses. First, he draws on a notion of the home that is informed by Freud’s discussion of das Unheimliche and upon which the relationships between subjects and objects are predicated. In Frackman’s view, the ambiguity and anxiety at the heart of Freud’s uncanny are fundamental to the relationship between subject and object, a relationship that defines each of the participants even as it connotes a shifting power balance. Frackman sees this Freudian conception of the Heim as the backdrop against which he reads the central relationships in his texts, where questions of belonging, exclusion, and agency are at stake. To Frackman, subject and object are themselves constructed through their relationships and are, thus, inherently unstable. He predicates this on some of the seminal work that has come out of philosophy and more recent gender and queer theory: from Hegel’s understanding of the formation of the subject as part of a relationship in which, ultimately, each participant’s “existence is at least partly a result of their status in the eyes of the thing/person who sits across from them, i.e., the thing that they desire and also desires them” (19), to Judith Butler’s notion of the instability and performativity of gender, to Kristeva’s theorization of abjection, to Foucault’s emphasis on the discursive construction of the body. To Frackman, these theoretical works give shape to his own reading of the subject and belonging as a process in which the other is crucial, in that it reveals the dominant power dynamics in a given time and space that constitute its otherness, and where “dominant and subjugated entities” (153) are in fact dependent on each other for their very existence.

Frackman traces the construction of the various others in four texts that he views as contextually similar, for all that they are temporally and generically varied: Frank Wedekind’s controversial play Frühlings Erwachen (1891), Robert Musil’s debut novel Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (1906), Kutluğ Ataman’s film Lola und Bilidikid (1999), and Pierre Sanoussi-Bliss’s film Zurück auf Los! (2000). Frackman suggests that these texts are connected not only by their shared emphasis on the spatial and/or temporal dimensions of exclusion/inclusion, but also by their respective moments of production: all four emerged [End Page 409] out of moments of cultural crisis, produced within a relatively short time of unification (1871) or re-unification (1990) and near the turn of a century. To Frackman, this suggests a structural similarity to the moments of production that contribute to his readings of the texts as ones in which we see especially clearly what is at stake in the cultural context: “What is threatening, what provokes fear, which members of a society are more or less vulnerable—all of this will affect the manner in which subjects react to each other” (12). While the precise content of these anxieties at the heart of exclusion vary in these moments, what Frackman suggests is that there nevertheless exists a structural similarity...

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