How to Use abjection in a Sentence

abjection

noun

• The premise gets stretched thinner still when, from under the stained pants and tattered tank tops that present Survivor as a sober study of communal abjection, mic packs peek out.
  — Megan Garber, The Atlantic, 14 May 2020
• Baywatch could have done with more such goofy meta-moments, treating the human body as a site of pleasure and fun rather than abjection and derision.
  — Dana Stevens, Slate Magazine, 25 May 2017
• Other painters found the basic form of Millet’s workers compelling, but balked at their misery and abjection.
  — Philip Kennicott, Washington Post, 27 Feb. 2020
• The abjection my mother endured was organized and funded by the city—from the police officers, to the judges, to the reporters who circled our house, hungry to add to their narratives.
  — Cheri Lucas Rowlands, Longreads, 23 Dec. 2022
• These books — so vaunted for their bravery, their abjection — are also, indisputably, an account of getting one’s own way.
  — New York Times, 19 Jan. 2021
• This is an image of middle-aged abjection, equally repulsive as the miner’s mangled leg.
  — Jamie Lauren Keiles, New York Times, 27 Nov. 2019
• The character careened between triumph and slapstick abjection as the puppeteers moved him across a long table with artificial turf.
  — Siddhartha Mitter, New York Times, 19 Nov. 2020
• What is harder to parse is how precisely the pain and abjection that Carey describes in such detail yielded her confidence, determination, and skill.
  — Emily Lordi, The New Yorker, 2 Oct. 2020
• The transition from darkness to dazzling light, a shock designed to induce a physical crisis, to reduce the subject to a state of abjection, nothing but a half-blind animal, stunned and panicking.
  — Hari Kunzru, The New Yorker, 29 June 2020
• Both authors are irreverent and unorthodox, both are drawn to abjection, and both engage in an extended reckoning with their own mothers.
  — Eula Biss, The New Yorker, 22 Apr. 2021
• The end point isn’t self-realization, but abjection, the would-be interpreter gibbering before the staggering number of connections.
  — Hari Kunzru, Harpers Magazine, 5 Jan. 2021
• Chiron and Paula certainly suffer (and inflict suffering on each other), but they are liberated from the standard indie-film arc of abjection and redemption.
  — A. O. Scott, New York Times, 20 Oct. 2016
• This is a movie that wills itself to end in madness, not to express something true about human abjection or to reflect something resonant in the culture at large, but rather to fit the narrative template of a highly bankable intellectual property.
  — Los Angeles Times, 1 Oct. 2019
• Both writers suggest that after six decades of upheaval, abjection defines Cuban existence more than resistance to adversity.
  — Coco Fusco, The New York Review of Books, 24 Mar. 2020
• Conflating agency with activity imposes a kind of autonomy and freedom in the choices made by the enslaved that obfuscates the conditions of subjection and abjection in slavery.
  — Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, The New Yorker, 17 Oct. 2022
• Sculpting from models or imagination, his hand ate away flesh to register how, instead of in what form, people existed for him, whether in pride or abjection, in loneliness or resilience—perhaps ridiculous, perhaps frightening.
  — Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, 6 June 2018
• Is there a particular kind of abjection that some of us are drawn to, participate in, possibly romanticize, even though nothing about our external lives necessarily suggests it?
  — Marion Winik, Washington Post, 21 Feb. 2020
• Thanks to the cult of plain honesty, abjection, and sincere appearance, however, they were not portrayed as doing so persuasively, powerfully, beautifully.
  — Jarrett Earnest, The New York Review of Books, 8 June 2022
• Balsam is marvelous throughout, precisely measured in portraying a state often teetering on abjection.
  — Glenn Kenny, New York Times, 7 May 2020
• After 2016’s humiliation and devastation, the left is searching for candidates both nationally and locally who can deliver the country from its current abjection.
  — Katy Waldman, Slate Magazine, 8 Aug. 2017
• The films lean into ambiguity and uncertainty, resisting a binary vision of pure abjection or simple victory.
  — New York Times, 19 July 2021

Last Updated: 23 Sep 2024