Affect

Copyright © 2021. New York University Press. All rights reserved. Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, edited by Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective, The Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective The, New York University Press, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6732670. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2021-09-28 11:06:42. Copyright © 2021. New York University Press. All rights reserved. Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, edited by Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective, The Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective The, New York University Press, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6732670. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2021-09-28 11:06:42. Keywords Collaborative in design and execution, the books in the Keywords series bring together scholars across a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, with each essay on a single term to help trace the contours and debates of a particular field. Keywords are the nodal points in many of today’s most dynamic and vexed discussions of political and social life, both inside and outside of the academy. Providing accessible A-to-Z surveys of prevailing scholarly concepts, the books serve as flexible tools for carving out new areas of inquiry. For more information, visit http://keywords.nyupress.org. Titles in the series include the following: Keywords for American Cultural Studies Edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler Keywords for Children’s Literature Edited by Phillip Nel and Lissa Paul Keywords for Asian American Studies Edited by Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Linda Trinh Võ, and K. 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Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2021-09-28 11:06:42. Edited by Ramzi Fawaz, Shelley Streeby, and Deborah Elizabeth Whaley Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies Edited by the Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective Copyright © 2021. New York University Press. All rights reserved. For a complete list of books in the series, see www.nyupress.org. Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, edited by Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective, The Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective The, New York University Press, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6732670. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2021-09-28 11:06:42. Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies Edited by the Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective Kyla Wazana Tompkins (managing editor), Aren Z. Aizura, Aimee Bahng, Karma R. Chávez, Mishuana Goeman, and Amber Jamilla Musser Copyright © 2021. New York University Press. All rights reserved. NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, edited by Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective, The Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective The, New York University Press, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6732670. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2021-09-28 11:06:42. NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York www.nyupress.org © 2021 by New York University All rights reserved References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Title: Keywords for gender and sexuality studies / edited by The Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective. Description: New York : New York University Press, [2021] | Series: Keywords | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2021014000 | ISBN 9781479808137 (hardback) | ISBN 9781479808151 (paperback) | ISBN 9781479808120 (ebook) | ISBN 9781479808168 (ebook other) Subjects: LCSH: Women’s studies. | Sex role—Terminology. | Women—Terminology. | Feminism. Classification: LCC HQ1180 .K49 2021 | DDC 305.42—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021014000 Copyright © 2021. New York University Press. All rights reserved. Hardback 9781479808137 Paperback 9781479808151 Consumer E-book 9781479808120 Library E-book 9781479808168 Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, edited by Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective, The Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective The, New York University Press, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6732670. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2021-09-28 11:06:42. 3 Affect Copyright © 2021. New York University Press. All rights reserved. Joshua Javier Guzmán “Can the subaltern feel?” asks José Esteban Muñoz (2006, 677) in response to Gayatri Spivak’s well-known dictum “Can the subaltern speak?” According to Spivak (1988), the subaltern, a postcolonial variation of the Gramscian figure of the economically dispossessed, cannot speak, let alone know herself under the neocolonial structures of discourse she seeks to disrupt. But does this also preclude the subaltern from feeling? Muñoz’s provocative retort gets to the epistemological problem at the center of affect studies: Can knowing be felt, and is feeling a way of knowing? The Spivak-Muñoz relay unearths what Judith Butler (1986) names the “Cartesian ghost” haunting western epistemology. In feminist theory, the Cartesian ghost represents the residual though consequential split between mind (i.e., thought, philosophy, consciousness, activity) and body, whereby the former is revered, valued, endowed, and proudly managerial over the latter, which, since antiquity, has been coded as feminine (i.e., the passions, the passive, the body, the corporal, the flesh). Therefore, what affect circumscribes for feminist theorization is how masculine gender norms of western colonial thought emerge as the very “embodiment of denial” of the body (J. Butler 1986, 44). This will have a profound impact on the gender binary system (masculine/feminine), where the body and its potential to feel and be affected are made to succumb to the will of masculine denial sanctified as reason and rationality. Affect’s history is a history of the irrational limit of reason, where what one can know is suspended and how we come to be—remembering Simone de Beauvoir’s watershed claim “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman” ([1949] 1989, 267; my emphasis)—takes flight. In other words, the processual is one of affect’s earliest articulations in feminist theory. Yet one cannot forget that Jean-Paul Sartre (1948), de Beauvoir’s partner and interlocutor, famously hated emotions, arguing for their irrelevance due to their obstructionist nature to thwart the real world, since in his paradigm, the “magical realm of emotions is something we regress into when under duress,” as Muñoz (2020, 71) has put it. Sartre’s suspicion of emotions mirrors a similar assessment by Sigmund Freud that emotions are merely spectacular symptoms of something deeper. In fact, the hysteric, the feminine Gothic figure who demonstrates Truth through what Sedgwick (1980, 102) called “the hieroglyphics of the body,” “acts out” feelings of betrayal, jealousy, and anxiety but has no language for them, since these feelings are not hers. They are projected onto her by her counterpart, the paranoid-schizoid: the masculine, cool, objective investigator/scientist/analysts/philosopher. (Think here of Regan’s terrible monstrosity [played by Linda Blair] in the 1973 film The Exorcist.) Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, edited by Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective, The Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective The, New York University Press, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6732670. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2021-09-28 11:06:42. Copyright © 2021. New York University Press. All rights reserved. Perhaps this is what leads Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa to proclaim that she “knew things before Freud” at the moment when she and fellow Chicana theorist Cherríe Moraga were advocating in the 1980s for “a theory in the flesh,” “where the physical realities of our lives—our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings—all fuse to create a politic born out of necessity. . . . We are the colored in a White feminist movement” (Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981, 21). To be colored here means to be the object of another’s projection, imbued with feelings of being indifferent and in contradiction with the norm. Meanwhile, Kyla Schuller (2018) shows how projection was understood as “impressionability” in nineteenth-century scientific and early psychoanalytic discourses marking the susceptibility of the feminized. Thus, between hysteria and “theories in the flesh,” it becomes clear that feelings can be projected; the boundary between interiority/exteriority blurs. Indeed, the processual is transitive in its ability to provisionally hold multiple objects in relation, even if said relations are “partial and ephemeral, subject to change, and altered by changing conditions,” as C. Riley Snorton (2017, 7) writes of his sensual archive in Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. And if the processual remains transitive, it can also be transferable. In the Transmission of Affect, Teresa Brennan (2004) reveals how the mood (what Heidegger called Stimmung) or atmosphere of a room registers on the body and thus can be altered by some body through transmission. To ignore or pathologize the way affect moves between individuals is to obscure a physical and social environment’s conditioning experience. These “public feelings” are apt grounds for social critique, since they question the way the nation-state, for example, mobilizes feelings as modes of control while also providing an opportunity to rethink forms of collectivity in the face of such oppressive regimes. “Capitalism has made and continues to make money out of cooking, smiling, fucking,” says the Italian Marxist feminist Silvia Federici. “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work” (1975, 1). What is called “affective labor” often looks like care work. Evelyn Nakano Glenn (2010) has forcefully documented this type of work from unpaid family caregivers to home health care workers in Forced to Care. Thus, care and love are fraught public feelings, since they entail a further mystification of labor at the expense of women, the poor, immigrants, and the precarious working class. Even online feelings in the form of likes, (dis)likes, laughs, and hearts contribute to how capital may insidiously profit from what Jodi Dean (2009) names “communicative labor,” a contemporary variation of such affective work. The transmission of affect actively politicizes emotions by making politics emotional (and personal) and in turn illuminates the social structures conditioning certain lives as livable and others as not by rendering certain genres of life as “likable” and others as not. To quote Ann Cvetkovich, “Depressed? It might be political” (2012, 2). “Ugly feelings” like depression, melancholia, and “shame and its sisters” have been central to anticolonial, anticapitalist, queer, and feminist approaches to affect (S. Ngai 2005; Sedgwick and Frank 1995). Depathologizing negative emotions such as those can be instrumental to political organizing rather than inhibitive to it and have been paramount to queer and feminist work. Cvetkovich’s (2003) An Archive of Feelings served as a response to Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, edited by Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective, The Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective The, New York University Press, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6732670. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2021-09-28 11:06:42. Copyright © 2021. New York University Press. All rights reserved. the more canonical “trauma studies” by cataloging the ways affects come to be sexualized and thus queer in not only moments of great social strife (the radical feminist movement, the anti-war movement, or AIDS activism) but also everyday life. If affects are transmittable, malleable, and relational, then they can also be mundane, minor, and ordinary. Sianne Ngai (2005) has demonstrated how “ugly feelings” such as envy and irritation, characteristic of modern life, are engendered as feminine and operate as noncathartic expressions of discontent. These “ordinary affects,” to borrow Kathleen Stewart’s (2010, 339) description, provide “worlding refrains” by which “forms, rhythms, and refrains” are disclosed through interrelated phenomena and between human and nonhuman actors, by the stuff outside of intentionality. However, Ranjana Khanna (2003) problematizes “worlding” by meeting it at its Heideggerian roots to exhibit how worlding’s disclosing characteristic requires a process of violently inscribing the colony into the modern postcolonial world. For Khanna, uncovering what was previously covered, obscured, opaque, dark, and inscrutable into the “world” throws the parochial into the universal, leaving in its trace colonial melancholia as a potentially refashioned ethics of transnational feminism. After all, as Jonathan Flatley (2008) has argued, melancholy is a sign of modernization itself. Some minoritarian and intersectional analyses foreground this particular affect to interrogate how a politics of loss more often than not shapes the way gender and sexuality studies approach their objects of investigation. In Anne Cheng’s (2000) The Melancholy of Race, the feeling of melancholia permeates literature on/from marginalized life in the United States. David Eng and Shinhee Han (2018) tag a particular manifestation of loss also as racial melancholia and dissociation in Asian American psychic life. Antonio Viego (2007) reminds us of the political purchase of centering loss in queer Latinx studies, while Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo (2016) melancholizes the figure of the indio barbaro for machista Chicanos, and Black feminists such as Saidiya Hartman (2008a) have attuned to such loss as the material remains of historical subjugation. When attenuating to archives, literature, art, and aesthetic practices about the emotional lives of those unpermitted to mourn their own “expulsion” from language, history, and thought, “feeling backward” toward a magnetizing lost object can parochialize attachments and thus proliferate them (Love 2009). Lauren Berlant (2011) has long studied how “the public” is affectively constituted through processes of attachments and detachments—“cruel optimism” being the most stubborn form of attachment to that which prevents one’s flourishing; Jennifer Doyle (2013) locates this dynamic in the art world as well, underscoring the coextensive work between affect and “relational aesthetics,” art work aimed at “moving” or “touching” the spectator and thus implicating her. However, if the capitalist patriarchy racializes the other through “economies of abandonment,” then by extension, capitalist patriarchy proliferates attachments, relations, and transmissions (Povinelli 2011a). Minoritarian and intersectional scholarship has, for some time now, sought to identify embodied knowledges that identify with such economies in hopes for collectivity and pleasure. For Juana María Rodríguez, processes of racialization provoke sexual longings, not entirely divorced from racial melancholia though in line with “the ephemera of affect that Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, edited by Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective, The Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective The, New York University Press, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6732670. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2021-09-28 11:06:42. Copyright © 2021. New York University Press. All rights reserved. leaves no trace” (2014, 4). Chasing the ghostly traces of sexual desire opens up ways of knowing through touching and feeling. As Native scholar Dian Million argues in “Felt Theory,” “Feelings are theory, important propositions about what is happening in our lives” (2009, 61). Viewed in this light, frustration as a form of inadequate anger indexes how the world, through systems and structures, makes one’s life impossible to live. Keep in mind, ugly feelings do not always guarantee political refusal, as Ngai (2005) elaborates after Paul Virilio. Negative emotions can always potentially be deployed and transmitted toward oppressive logics. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed (2004) contends that emotions are sticky, provoking orientations toward or away, under or beyond ideas, bodies, and things. In Queer Phenomenology (2006), she develops these arguments to demonstrate how the way one is oriented in space and time (the world) affects what objects are within and out of reach. Ahmed’s (2017) larger feminist project is one of reorienting academic discourse to alternative worldviews that enable someone like “the feminist killjoy” to refuse the orgiastic “promise of happiness” dangled in front of her and to instead feel her way through movements for social change. I like to think about Ahmed and other feminist theorists grappling with the affective life of surviving alongside Lizzie Borden’s 1983 feminist fiction film Born in Flames. The film tells the story of two feminist pirate radio stations broadcasting to the public in a socialist alternative United States. After an international feminist activist mysteriously dies in police custody, the community spurs into action guided by the two stations broadcasting feminist consciousness-raising messages. Shot documentary-style, Born in Flames intimately captures the everyday life of sexism and direct action. After both radio stations are mysteriously burned to the ground, they combine forces and broadcast together out of a stolen van, where they interrupt the US president’s address to proclaim on air that women should be paid for their housework. The film ends with a shot of the antenna at the top of one of the Twin Towers exploding. Born in Flames can be said to be a film about the wielding of public feelings to combat racism, sexism, homophobia, and exploitation. The lo-fi quality of the film mirrors bootleg culture and the undercommons of sensibility crucial to feminist knowledge sharing. With the phallic destruction of mainstream broadcasting closing the film, Born in Flames takes seriously the textured ways we come to know about each other’s suffering—the sensing of commonality—while transmitting a willful desire to feel the world differently. Feminist approaches to affect studies become more visible when we heed Roderick A. Ferguson’s (2004, 134) description of the Combahee River Collective’s articulation of the “simultaneity of oppressions” (a phrase he borrows from Barbara Smith) through group ties —or affects. For Audre Lorde ([1984] 2007e), “love between women” predicated her thinking of the erotic, that affective force capable of breaking through the enslaver’s broadcast like the explosion of an antenna. What Lorde called the “erotic” is not unlike what Chicana feminist Chela Sandoval has called a “hermeneutics of love” (2000). These ties, or affects, demonstrate how “theory in the flesh” can link pleasure, desire, feeling, and sense at the disjuncture between knowing (differently) and being (different). Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, edited by Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective, The Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective The, New York University Press, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6732670. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2021-09-28 11:06:42.