Capital's Abjects: Chinese Cinemas, Urban Horror, and the Limits of Visibility.

摘要

Capital's Abjects examines the emergence of transnational urban horror during the advancement of capitalism in post-1980s Chinese societies in China and Taiwan. Lacking monsters, ghosts, or graphic violence, urban horror differs qualitatively from body-centered horror that operates on a cinematic rhetoric of extremity. Given the unique interrupted development of horror in government-monopolized Chinese film industries, horror as an affect returns concurrently with intensified capitalist development. Rather than reading horror as universally translatable, this project rethinks horror's critical receptivity of social discontents on the one hand, while outlining the significance of urban space in shaping, structuring, and articulating social realities that are not-yet-thinkable. In traditional approaches to urban films, one tendency is to map recognizable landmarks as a way of legitimating a city's history and identity. However, this project draws attention to the city's abjected sites at the limit of visibility---sites that destabilize the secure transmission of bourgeois, patriarchal, hygienic, and nationalist ideologies in the creation of privatized and domesticated cities.;While "abject" may be read as rejected and expelled, the term most specifically indicates indistinguishability between self and the other. When applied in critical studies of urban space, "capital's abjects" entails a collection of the most intimate, private, and everyday spaces, such as bathrooms, kitchens, apartments, construction sites, as well as the body. In what I am calling an intimate urban revolution, these familiar urban sites are radically reimagined in urban horror films based on the lived experiences of women, immigrant workers, rebellious teenagers, and more. By juxtaposing "urban" and "horror," I do not propose a study that fetishizes minoritized experiences as monstrous or horrific. Rather, the term is used as to invoke a revolution of the senses and the sensible. As I illustrate in this dissertation, urban horror, through a rearticulation of lived experiences, makes drastic expansions to the sensible world. Shifting, reforming, or dissolving boundaries between the visible and invisible, audible and noise, and surface and depth, urban horror establishes a channel capable of mobilizing new networks and communities, and aids in the emergence of political subjectivities.