Transgressive Fiction: The Accuser Theory. Kristeva’s Abject Woman

The Accuser Theory is the term given post-millennial transgressive fiction set within discourses that privilege male sexualized violence. To address this segment of the paper asks: how does males’ sexualized violence construct woman in transgressive fiction and how can she be radicalized in the current digitized era? This is answered through a textual analysis of prominent transgressive novels from a late Western capitalist context with an overall aim of radicalizing woman through her undefinable sexuality. Bret Easton Ellis, Irvine Welsh and Chuck Palahniuk write transgressive fiction which makes a socially relevant statement. Imperial Bedrooms is focused upon in this paper through a deconstruction of his use of woman as an object as a means for transgression through constructs of male sexualized violence. Using the approach Critical Discourse Analysis through close readings, the ways of seeing that shape woman in transgressive fiction today become available. The immersion of digital media to unprecedented levels has created a new sex industry which has impacted the human subject in profound ways and directly informs woman. Van Dijk proved discourse structures prevalent in society are revealed through the modal verb operators in each text, which point to cultural obligatory ways of seeing, and can detect the presence of ideology governing the lens in which the fiction is told. Locating woman in the transgressive novels under study results from the constructs which emerge from the rogue narrator’s use of taboo, which order her sexuality, and its confrontation with death, the transformative trope, and thus reveals if ideology is at play. By deep theories of transgression, it is possible to approach these works as products of a new culture from deeper philosophical aspects. Transgression has a limited character and does not affect the stability of the taboo since it is its expected compliment. However, when the literary articulation of death is present, transformation takes place, promoting equality rather than hierarchy. Informed by a Western twenty-first-century sex industry context, the classic theories are re-historized to the present because of their perennial ability to engage taboo and transgression, which are more visible today than ever. The changes to the construction of woman across the turn of the century are highlighted to offer greater contextualization to the transgressive literary landscape amidst shifts in the articulation of the sex industry by big tech in the wider social sphere to find woman’s inexorable sexuality.