Abstract
Flannery O’Connor uses satire and grotesque imagery to explore themes of gender and racial oppression in the South. The grotesque bodies and culture portrayed in O’Connor’s stories can be interpreted through Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection. In her 1982 essay Powers of Horror, Kristeva defines abjection as anything outside the self that threatens our very concept of selfhood. O’Connor’s grotesque characters confront the abjection of oppressive race and gender politics of the Old South within their own warped bodies and experience what Kristeva calls jouissance or the painful, yet ecstatic, fulfilment of unity with the abject. This leads to a painful, yet healing, realization that they have internalized the abject qualities they despise. Like O’Connor’s protagonists, readers also experience jouissance themselves as they confront the representations of race and gender oppression within the space of O’Connor’s fiction. This space ultimately functions as a site of psychological healing for the individual reader and leads to possibility of healing for society as a whole.