Abstract
This article puts John Waters into conversation with Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan, shedding new light on the political significance of the abject in Waters's trash cinema. The argument focuses on Waters's uses of the abject in both his early “transgressive” films and his later “mainstream” films, taking issue with the critical tradition that associates the abject with a celebration of queerness. Instead, by reading Waters's 1994 film Serial Mom, as well as some of his writing and visual art, this article argues that Waters's work undoes the oppositions between queer and normative, transgressive and mainstream, revolutionary and conservative, through his mobilization of the abject. In particular, this article is most interested in the metaphorics of trash in John Waters's work and in psychoanalysis. Waters is, of course, well known for his “trash trilogy,” which includes his most famous film Pink Flamingos (US, 1972). This article suggests that Serial Mom (US, 1994) is another sort of trash film. Actual trash is central to the plot of Serial Mom and invites us to think through what trash signifies in this film and throughout Waters's works. Trash, for Waters, signifies in multiple and contradictory ways, unsettling our understandings of the world and ourselves.
