Powers of Horror

01Kristeva coined 'abjection' to describe the process by which the maternal body is expelled to create the illusion of a clean, bounded self.
02She argued that horror literature and religious pollution taboos — blood, corpses, excrement — share the same unconscious target: the mother.
03Published in France in 1980, the text was taught in feminist theory courses before it was taught in psychoanalysis programs.

Julia Kristeva's 'Powers of Horror' argued that civilization is built by expelling the mother's body — its fluids, its borders, its intimacy — and that all disgust traces back to that founding rejection. The self is a structure built on maternal revulsion.