Identity of The Grotesque: Transgression Through Visual Media

- Presentation speakers
  - İlknur Gürses Akbaykal, Ege University, Izmir, Turkey
Abstract:

The body is a natural and cultural image at the same time. As Bakhtin and Kristeva emphasized the modern western body is the project of the Enlightenment era. Thus, the complete, linear and unite body of the Enlightenment is an outcome of Apollonic discourse which is the cultural discourse itself and always in a dichotomist relationship with the Nature. All the grotesque and abject situations of the body is metaphor of the nature and they transgress the borders of the Enlightenment’s organized and reproduced body. In other words, grotesque and abject body images are the transgressive ones which are the other of fictive cultural body. This study will be focused on the grotesque/transgressive body images represented in the visual media to excess the borders of Cultural/Apollonic Discourse. Samples from photography, cinema and advertisements will be analyzed within the framework of Bakhtin’s dialogism conceptualization.