Roots of Abject art go back before the Renaissance but it wasn't until a cultural fascination with transgression and taboo made it possible for Abject Art to exist as a movement. Often centered on exoteric groups: women, unwed mothers, prostitutes, convicts, addicts, poverty, and the disabled. It is imperative that we do not confuse gender bending, homosexuality, and deviance which compromise Queer Theory; that which is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, and/or the dominant. It is an identity without an essence. 'Queer' then, demarcates not positivity but positionality according to David Halpern. Queer theory builds upon feminist challenges to the idea that gender is part of the essential self and upon gay/lesbian studies' close examination of the socially constructed nature of sexual acts and identities. The concept of "abject" exists between the concept of an object and the concept of the subject, something alive yet not. This term is discussed in the works of Julia Kristeva who considers one aspect of abjection to be a part of ourselves that we exclude: excrement, spit, urine, blood, or semen. Being forced to face an inherently traumatic experience is another example something that makes an individual confront their own mortality, a person would be repulsed because of being forced to face an object which is cast out of the world, having once been a subject. We encounter living beings daily. To confront a corpse that we recognize as human, something that should be alive but isn't, is to confront the reality that we are capable of dying ourselves. This repulsion is created by the sight of death and rot. Two artists who epitomize elements of the abject are Tracy Emin and Gillian Wearing. At moments tender Tracey Emin's artwork especially those centered on childbirth, betray the underlying tension of an idealized woman and the carnal realities of human nature. Whether disgusting, crass, or profane she does not shy from shock value, over her career she has mined incest, rape, abortion, anal and vaginal intercourse. Whether she is as preoccupied with coitus as her work suggests, her ability and perhaps the root of her art is the creation of an alter ego or cultural identity. While her artwork may have been more formidable before the arrival of the say-post-anything facebook generation. The current undertone to divulge any thought from the vapid to the pornographic is fair game because it is, not because it has merit - merely in the fact that it was formed at all. Perhaps we have entered an era where narcissism outperforms talent. Gillian Wearing also a British artist like Emin extrapolates upon the groundwork of Cindy Sherman and Carolee Scheeman. In a recent show Wearing recreated the personae of her mother, father, brother, uncle, and younger self; exploring the shifting nature of self, as well as the roles that define and limit sociology. Photographic impersonation of others is not an original idea, with the assistance of professional make-up artists Wearing produces impressive feats of disguise in lieu of digital manipulation. The struggle between the unique self and the hand of genetic destiny is something that anyone with parents and siblings knows. We must abject the maternal, the object which created us, in order to construct an identity.