Julia Kristeva (b. 1941) was born in Bulgaria, and moved to Paris for her doctoral studies in philosophy. In 1965 she became a member of the Tel Quel Group in Paris, important for their work on the production of writing as a political activity. In 1974 she was appointed Chair of Linguistics at the University of Paris. In 1979 she completed her training in psychoanalysis. Her published theory works include, Desire in Language (1969; English trans. 1980), Powers of Horror (1980; English trans. 1982), Black Sun (1989; English trans. 1992), Nations without Nationalism (1993), Time and Sense (1996), Crisis of the European Subject (2000), Female Genius: Life, Madness, Words (1999; vol. 1, English trans. 2001). Her works of fiction include The Old Man and the Wolves (1991), Possessions (1996) and Murder in Byzantium (2004). Kristeva's exploration of language as a fluid semiology accesses the chora or “woman's” space of the in-between to challenge and interrogate the arbitrary nature of language and the symbolic. By experiencing film through a semiotic navigation of corporeality, materiality and affect, the spectator opens up to the possibility of experiencing and encountering film differently, and thus the way film both informs and creates meaning can be used experimentally rather than reifying established power structures. Salient to the feminist semiotics, Kristeva's work on the abject similarly investigates the risks and revolutions of those elements of language, including the language of images, when they exceed boundaries, collapse borders and involute language with flesh, logic with bodies. Her work on semiotics and the abject thus can be used towards a feminist ethics of spectatorship.