From Abjection to Posthuman Femininity in the Animated Film Cottage Cheese

The article examines the short animated film Cottage Cheese (2025) at the intersection of the theories of abjection, feminist surrealism and posthumanism. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, it approaches the protagonist’s encounter with her own bodily materiality as an experience that destabilises the boundaries between subject and object. Through surrealist animation, this destabilisation is transformed from a source of disgust and shame into a space of curiosity, play and self-discovery. Drawing on Whitney Chadwick’s work, the article situates the film within a feminist tradition that shifts woman from an object of representation towards the subject of her own embodied experience, while Rosi Braidotti’s theory extends this shift towards posthuman subjectivity. Cottage Cheese thus articulates femininity as a fluid and relational process emerging through the entanglement of body, environment and others.

The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!