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Order Description "turn into affect" please summary the introduction part. Working with Affect in Feminist Readings Affect has become something of a buzzword in cultural and feminist theory during the past decade. References to affect, emotions and intensities abound; their implications in terms of research practices have often remained less manifest. Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences explores the place and function of affect in feminist knowledge production in general and in textual methodology in particular. With an international group of contributors from studies of history, media, philosophy, culture, ethnology, art, literature and religion, the volume investigates affect as the dynamics of reading, as carnal encounters and as possibilities for the production of knowledge. Working with Affect in Feminist Readings asks what exactly are we doing when working with affect, and what kinds of ethical, epistemological and ontological issues this involves. Not limiting itself to descriptive accounts, the volume takes part in establishing new ways of understanding feminist methodology. Marianne Liljeström is Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. Her research interests are in Russian/Soviet history, and in feminist theory and methodology. Her most recent publications are Feminist Knowing – Discussions on Methodology (editor, in Finnish, 2004) and Useful Selves: RussianWomen’s Autobiographical Texts from the Post-War Period (2004). Susanna Paasonen is a research fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki. With an interest in internet research, studies of sexuality and popular media culture, she is the author of Figures of Fantasy (Lang, 2005) and co-editor of Women and Everyday Uses of the Internet (Lang, 2002) and Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media Culture (Berg, 2007). Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism Edited by: Maureen McNeil, Institute of Women’s Studies, Lancaster University Lynne Pearce, Department of English, Lancaster University Other books in the series include: Transformations Thinking through feminism Edited by Sarah Ahmed, Jane Kilby, Celia Lury, Maureen McNeil and Beverley Skeggs Thinking Through the Skin Edited by Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey Strange Encounters Embodied others in post-coloniality Sara Ahmed Feminism and Autobiography Texts, theories, methods Edited by Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury and Penny Summerfield Advertising and Consumer Citizenship Gender, images and rights Anne M. Cronin Mothering the Self Mothers, daughters, subjects Stephanie Lawler When Women Kill Questions of agency and subjectivity Belinda Morrissey Class, Self, Culture Beverley Skeggs Haunted Nations The colonial dimensions of multiculturalisms Sneja Gunew The Rhetorics of Feminism Readings in contemporary cultural theory and the popular press Lynne Pearce Women and the Irish Diaspora Breda Gray Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology Kirsten Campbell Judging the Image Art, value, law Alison Young Sexing the Soldier Rachel Woodward and Trish Winter Violent Femmes Women as spies in popular culture Rosie White Pregnancy, Risk and Biopolitics On the threshold of the living subject Lorna Weir Feminist Cultural Studies of Science and Technology Maureen McNeil Arab, Muslim, Woman Voice and vision in postcolonial literature and film Lindsey Moore Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process Feminist reflections Róisín Ryan-Flood and Rosalind Gill Working with Affect in Feminist Readings Disturbing differences Edited by Marianne Liljeström and Susanna Paasonen Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice The rhetorics of comparison Carolyn Pedwell Sociability, Sexuality, Self Relationality and individualization Sasha Roseneil Working with Affect in Feminist Readings Disturbing differences Edited by Marianne Liljeström and Susanna Paasonen First published 2010 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2010 Marianne Liljeström and Susanna Paasonen for selection and editorial material All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Liljeström, Marianne. Working with affect in feminist readings : disturbing differences / Marianne Liljeström and Susanna Paasonen. p. cm. 1. Affect (Psychology) 2. Feminism. I. Paasonen, Susanna, 1975- II. Title. BF531.L528 2009 305.42–dc22 2009014980 ISBN13 978-0-415-48139-7 (hbk) ISBN13 978-0-203-88592-5 (ebk) ISBN10 0-415-48139-2 (hbk) ISBN10 0-203-88592-9 (ebk) This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. ISBN 0-203-88592-9 Master e-book ISBN Contents Notes on contributors ix Introduction: Feeling differences – affect and feminist reading 1 MARIANNE LILJESTRÖM AND SUSANNA PAASONEN 1 Anaffective turn? Reimagining the subject of feminist theory 8 ANU KOIVUNEN PART I Affective attachments 29 2 Creating disturbance: Feminism, happiness and affective differences 31 SARA AHMED 3 A sense of play: Affect, emotion and embodiment in World of Warcraft 45 JENNY SUNDÉN 4 Disturbing, fleshy texts: Close looking at pornography 58 SUSANNA PAASONEN 5 Expanding laughter: Affective viewing, body image incongruity and Fat Actress 72 KATARIINA KYRÖLÄ 6 Daughters of privilege: Class, sexuality, affect and the Gilmore Girls 85 LEENA-MAIJA ROSSI PART II Dynamics of difference 99 7 Differences disturbing identity: Deleuze and feminism 101 ELIZABETH GROSZ 8 Nomadic bodies, transformative spaces: Affective encounters with Indian spirituality 112 JOHANNA AHONEN 9 Hips don’t lie? Affective and kinaesthetic dance ethnography 126 ANU LAUKKANEN 10 Ethics of empathy and reading in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night 140 ELINAVALOVIRTA 11 Beyond redemption? Mobilizing affect in feminist reading 151 LYNNE PEARCE 12 Crossing the east-west divide: Feminist affective dialogues 165 MARIANNE LILJESTRÖM 13 Working with affect in the corporate university 182 MELISSA GREGG Index 193 viii Contents Contributors Sara Ahmed is Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College and works at the intersection of feminist, queer and critical race studies. Her books include Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (1998); Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (2000); The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) and Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006). Her next book The Promise of Happiness is forthcoming with Duke University Press. Johanna Ahonen is a PhD student of Finnish National Doctoral School of Women’s Studies at the University of Turku and her doctoral thesis in progress deals with gender, embodiment and sexuality in Indian-inspired alternative spiritualities in Finland. Her research interests also include the religious and the secular in the contemporary West, gender in Indian philosophy, Tantric and Shakta traditions, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Deleuzian feminism. Melissa Gregg is a lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney, specialising in media, intimacy and work cultures. She is author of Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices (Palgrave, 2006) and co-editor, with Gregory J. Seigworth, of The Affect Theory Reader (Duke University Press, forthcoming). Elizabeth Grosz teaches in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Rutgers University, New Jersey. She has worked on feminist and French philosophy, particularly on theories of the body and theories of space and time. She is the author most recently of Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (Columbia University Press, 2008). Anu Koivunen is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at Stockholm University and a member of the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change (Academy of Finland), The Politics of Philosophy and Gender Research Team 2006–11. She is the author of Performative Histories, Foundational Framings. Gender and Sexuality in Niskavuori Films (1938–1984) (Helsinki: Finnish Historical Society, 2003), and currently conducting research on ‘Moving experiences: Affective turns in Cinema and Media Studies’. Katariina Kyrölä is a researcher in Media Studies, University of Turku, and finalizing her PhD research on fat bodies in contemporary media, affect and corporeal viewing. She has published several articles on the topic and co-edited the first Finnish anthology on feminist politics of body size (Size Matters! Helsinki: Like, 2007). Anu Laukkanen is a PhD student of Folkloristics at the School of Cultural Research, University of Turku. In her PhD thesis she explores what kind of encounters between differentially positioned subjects are possible in the field of belly dancing in Finland. Her main interests are intercultural performances, feminist dance ethnography, and the role of emotions and the body in the research process. Marianne Liljeström is Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. Her research interests are in Russian/Soviet history, and in feminist theory and methodology. Her most recent publications are Feminist Knowing – Discussions on Methodology (editor, in Finnish, 2004) and Useful Selves: Russian Women’s Autobiographical Texts from the Post-War Period (2004). Susanna Paasonen is a research fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki. With an interest in internet research, studies of sexuality and popular media culture, she is the author of Figures of Fantasy (Lang, 2005) and co-editor of Women and Everyday Uses of the Internet (Lang, 2002) and Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media Culture (Berg, 2007). Lynne Pearce is Chair of Literary Theory and Women’s Writing at Lancaster University, UK. Her books include Woman/Image/Text: Readings in Pre- Raphaelite Art and Literature (1991), Reading Dialogics (1994), Feminism and the Politics of Reading (1997), The Rhetorics of Feminism (2004) and Romance Writing (2007), as well as several edited collections focused on issues of reception and epistemology. From 2006–9 she was director and principal investigator of the AHRC-funded research project ‘Moving Manchester: Mediating marginalities’. Leena-Maija Rossi is Associate Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Helsinki. Her research interests include performativity of gender and sexuality, and intersections of different aspects of identity, especially in representations of visual culture. She is the author of the books Art in Power (1999, in Finnish) and Hetero Factory (2003, in Finnish). Jenny Sundén is Assistant Professor at the Department of Media Technology, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. Her research interests are primarily in new media studies, science and technology studies, queer/ feminist theory and games. She is the author of Material Virtualities: Approaching Online Textual Embodiment (Lang, 2003), and co-editor of Cyberfeminism in Northern Lights: Gender and Digital Media in a Nordic x Contributors Context (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007) and Second Nature: Origins and Originality in Art, Science and New Media (forthcoming). Elina Valovirta is finishing her doctoral thesis on feminist reader theory in Anglophone Caribbean women’s writing at the Department of English, University of Turku in Finland. Her published work is mainly on Caribbean women’s writing. She recently co-edited the book Seeking the Self – Encountering the Other. Diasporic Narrative and the Ethics of Representation (Cambridge Scholars’ Publishing, 2008). Contributors xi Introduction Feeling differences – affect and feminist reading Marianne Liljeström and Susanna Paasonen Affect has become a challenging epistemological question in feminist research as its theorizations as intensities of feeling, emotional attachments and gut reactions have multiplied within cultural theory during the past decade (e.g. Pearce 1997; Lupton 1998). Affect has turned into a site for rethinking theoretical concerns ranging from dualisms of the mind and the body to critiques of identity politics and practices of critical reading. Drawing on the work of thinkers as different as Baruch Spinoza or Silvan Tomkins, this rethinking has emphasized the carnal ways of being in, experiencing and understanding the world that are fundamentally relational and productive. New materialist critiques in particular have argued for the shortcomings of textual analysis and the legacy of the so-called textual turn for its tendency to downplay the sensory and the material in accounts of society and culture while conceptualizing cultural phenomena as discourses, texts or systems to be interpreted (e.g. Massumi 2002). For many, the so-called ‘affective turn’ is a reaction towards the limitations of post-structuralist theorizations, their structuralist legacies and commitment to linguistic models. In contrast, considerations of affect foreground questions of matter, biology and energetic forces (Scott 2001; Braidotti 2002; Barad 2003; Clough and Halley 2007). This critical debate has contributed to a return to the so-called ontological question as connected to the pondering of difference(s) between identity categories – or what today is often called the intersectional approach to feminist knowledge production. It can indeed be argued that there has been an overuse of textual metaphors in cultural theory since the 1990s (as in the readings of bodies, landscapes or artefacts as texts to be interpreted or ‘decoded’ without accounting for their materiality): a broad range of intellectual concerns are bypassed or even lost if focusing solely on the semantic and the symbolic. Nevertheless, such critique risks conveying a rather limited, if not flat, understanding of reading as a critical activity. Importantly, it may also block from view the centrality of reading, interpretation and experience – and that of ethics – as intellectual concerns within feminist research. Feminist literary scholars have paid attention to the inseparability of affect and interpretation: rather than readerly mastery, interpretation becomes a question of contagious affects and dynamic encounters between texts and readers (Gallop 1988; Pearce 1997; Armstrong 2000; Sedgwick 2003; Ngai 2005). Cinema and media studies scholars, again, have elaborated on synaesthetic sensations, embodied experiences and forceful impressions involved in screen-based media (Marks 2002; Sobchack 2004), whereas scholars investigating the boundary work concerning the spheres of the public and the private have theorized the role of affect in marking individual and collective bodies apart from one another through hierarchical notions of difference (Berlant 2000; Cvetkovich 2003; Ahmed 2004). In thinking through the notion of difference(s), the affective dimensions of feminism itself have been increasingly taken under scrutiny (hooks 2000; Ahmed 2004; Ngai 2005; Probyn 2005). In the wake of these debates, Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences explores the place and role of affect in feminist knowledge production in general and in textual methodology in particular. With a focus on practices of reading (above all, in ethnography, interviews, close reading, narrative and discourse analysis), the volume at hand investigates the methodological possibilities of working with and through affect in feminist research, asking what implications does working with affect have for practices of reading. What kinds of considerations of scholarly agency, accountability and ethics does it entail? And what kinds of knowledge does it facilitate? Rather than to position considerations of materiality, affect and embodiment in opposition to textual analysis, the book investigates their interrelations as intimate co-dependence. In the very first chapter of the volume, titled ‘An affective turn? Reimagining the subject of feminist theory’, Anu Koivunen provides an analytical overview of the different definitions of the ‘affective turn’ in relation to other ‘turns’ within feminist theorization (including linguistic, phenomenological and ontological turns, turns to the body and the personal). Koivunen questions the dramatic notion of ‘a turn’, contextualizes recent scholarly debates on affect and ties them into the development and different paradigms of feminist theory. Koivunen also investigates the connections and differences between the concepts of affect, emotion, passion and feeling, as well as the different intellectual traditions and concerns connected to them, hence providing a framework for the discussions on the ‘affective turn’, as well as for the essays in this particular volume. Working with Affect in Feminist Readings is divided into two thematic parts, titled ‘Affective Attachments’ and ‘Dynamics of Difference’, respectively. While the themes, as well as those presented in the individual chapters, do inevitably overlap, the sections offer slightly different approaches to affect and feminist reading. The chapters in the first part, ‘Affective Attachments’, are connected by their focus on issues of embodiment (in the sense of bodily encounters, body images, avatars and sexually explicit imagery) as well as the power of texts and images to move their viewers in highly bodily ways. The authors ask what it means to be moved by and attached to the texts and images we study, as well as the kinds of analytical possibilities this entails. 2 Liljeström and Paasonen Sara Ahmed’s chapter, ‘Creating disturbance: Feminism, happiness and affective differences’, focuses on what she titles ‘unhappy feminist archives’. These take shape through the circulation of cultural objects that articulate an unhappiness with happiness, objects that perhaps have already acquired an affective value. Ahmed’s method is to explore how certain objects come to be affective over time: how some bodies cause disturbance, or become the cause of disturbance, because they refuse to participate in the happiness wish. She emphasizes that to refuse the happiness wish involves an affective reorientation – while you can cause disturbance, you can also turn disturbance into a cause. In ‘A sense of play: Affect, emotion, and embodiment in World of Warcraft’, Jenny Sundén explores embodied experiences, affective investments and circulations in the online role-playing game World of Warcraft by using the methods of ethnography and close playing. She asks what this kind of enormously popular game sets in motion as an aesthetic object and, more broadly, as a media text, as well as the effects such ‘movement’ may have on the ways of thinking and feeling. Sundén argues for an expansion of game studies by asking queer questions concerning gender and sexuality, and by cherishing an affective, passionate approach to games both theoretically and methodologically. The theme of the affective force of texts continues in Susanna Paasonen’s chapter, ‘Disturbing, fleshy texts: Close looking at pornography’. By paying attention to the neglected complexity of affect and conflicting emotional responses related to pornography, stepping away from the pleasure/ disgust binary embedded in feminist studies of porn and considering the uncontrollable aspects of images, Paasonen experiments with close looking at pornography that involves acknowledging the power of images and the effects of being moved or touched by them. The chapter addresses a specific image of a penis and a running shoe in an aim to shift attention from the meanings of the image to the workings and affect of pornography. In ‘Expanding laughter: Affective viewing, body image incongruity and Fat Actress’, Katariina Kyrölä continues to think about sensory engagements with media texts. With the purpose of mapping out the possibilities of laughter to expand our views of ourselves and others, she analyses the television comedy show Fat Actress (USA 2005) in relation to corporeal laughing spectatorship and the critical possibilities of unruly feminist laughter. She shows, on the one hand, how the concept of body image can be fruitful in analysing the corporeal effects of images, and, on the other hand, how laughter can be approached as an affective and power-entrenched relation between viewing and imaged bodies. The section ends with Leena-Maija Rossi’s chapter, ‘Daughters of privilege: Class, sexuality, affect and the Gilmore Girls’, addressing affective media relationships in the series Gilmore Girls (USA 2001–7). Rossi reserves the notion of emotion to representations and the concept of affect to the bodily effects of these representations. With an interest in reading surprising and contradictory moments and critical undercurrents in the series, she discusses three aspects in particular: parodic representation of gendered Introduction 3 white upper-class privilege; jokes referring to non-normative sexuality and awkward moments of same-sex closeness, and a complex stance towards futurity. The chapters in the second part, ‘Dynamics of Difference’, address the concept of difference from diverse viewpoints – as experiences of difference within transnational feminism, hierarchical edifices of differences and difference as incalculable force alike. The section opens with Elizabeth Grosz’s critical discussion on the concepts of identity and intersectionality, titled ‘Differences disturbing identity: Deleuze and feminism’. Grosz expresses concern towards the narrowing focus of feminist thinking caused by the vast attention given to the narrational, the personal and the individual. According to Grosz, this selective focus leaves out questions related to the rest of existence as feminism abdicates the right to speak about the real, matter or forces both social and material. In contrast, and grounded in Deleuzian feminist theory, she addresses (pure) difference as the generative force that enacts materiality itself, as the movement of difference that marks the very energies of existence before and beyond identity. In the following chapter, titled ‘Nomadic bodies, transformative spaces: Affective encounters with Indian spirituality’, Johanna Ahonen considers the spiritual Indian leader Amma and her embrace (darshan). By exploring the phenomenon through the notion of affect as intensities between bodies and utilizing her ethnographic fieldwork, Ahonen aims to deconstruct dualisms such as spiritual/corporeal, transcendence/immanence or rational/mystical. She does this by combining the Deleuzian feminist concept of becoming with the Indian philosophical notion of shakti (feminine cosmic power). The chapter shows how these concepts facilitate considerations of transformative energy and create a potential source for new feminist theorizations of ontology. While Ahonen is concerned with the theorization of spiritual experiences as dynamic forces difficult to grasp through more conventional research methodology, Anu Laukkanen brings together the methods of kinaesthetic empathy and affective reading in her exploration into the possibilities of bodily, affective knowledge in dance ethnography. Her chapter, ‘Hips don’t lie? Affective and kinaesthetic dance ethnography’, investigates the conflicting and ambivalent emotional paths of so-called Egyptian feeling and the Egyptian styles of Oriental dance. ‘Egyptian feeling’ works as a conceptual, cultural and bodily intersection through which Laukkanen considers the ambivalent nature of getting moved by dance and the histories of bodies experiencing dance. In the chapter ‘Ethics of empathy and reading in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night’, Elina Valovirta brings together the idea of the Caribbean queer with the affective and ethical ‘turns’ in feminism. More specifically, Valovirta focuses on the role of reading in relation to the ethics of empathy at play in the novel. She examines how an extraordinary text-reader bond emerges because of the refusal of the text’s vocabulary to explicitly name certain sexual identities, and shows how the affective process of ‘withness’ (a 4 Liljeström and Paasonen concept introduced by Sara Ahmed) becomes a way to conceptualize ‘queerness’ in the relationship between the protagonists and in the subsequent textreader relationship. Continuing further with the method of close reading, Lynne Pearce asks the intriguing question as to why we should wish to write or read a story that does not move its characters, and us as readers, forward in some way or give us any reward in the end. Questioning the urge of constant forward-looking, her chapter, ‘Beyond redemption? Mobilizing affect in feminist reading’, addresses two novels by migrate women writers about ‘minor emotions’, about hopelessness and disappointment, stories that do not go anywhere. Methodologically, Pearce emphasizes the necessity of making conscious, ‘always already’ political, interpretative choices in our affective readings. The last chapter in this section is Marianne Liljeström’s ‘Crossing the eastwest divide: Feminist affective dialogues’, which moves to thinking about geopolitical differences. Liljeström engages critically with integrationist feminist aspirations by reading the work of the Ukranian feminist Irina Zherebkina and her applications of Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity to the construction of current post-Soviet gender discourse. Her contextual affective reading emphasizes both interlinked historical experiences and discursive networks across borders, yet underlines that the awareness of such links and care for enhanced transnational feminist communication does not absolve one from the potentiality of failed understanding. The book ends with Melissa Gregg’s chapter ‘Working with affect in the corporate university’. Gregg examines the concept of affective labour and research traditions concerning it, and extends these considerations to the conditions of the contemporary workplace. By drawing parallels to studies of fandom and participatory culture, which underline the importance of scholars recognizing their own involvement and investment in the cultures of consumption they study, she addresses transformations in the white-collar workplace and, more specifically, their consequences for scholarship in the context of the corporate university where academics are presumed to strongly invest in the workplace as a source of identity. Gregg suggests that academics should cease to understand their own work lives as exceptional and that they must acknowledge their own forms of ‘working with affect’ in order to provide more comprehensive studies of the production cultures of knowledge work. As this overview makes evident, Working with Affect in Feminist Readings takes a broad approach to both studies of affect and practices of reading. Rather than attaching itself to any singular theoretical framework, paradigm or definition concerning the ‘affective turn’ (e.g. Clough and Halley 2007), the volume asks for what ends this turn has been envisioned and defined, as well as the kinds of implications theorizations of affect have for feminist research in general, and for textual methods in particular. Methodologically, the individual chapters draw on forms of textual analysis: research material varies from novels and scholarly books to online role-playing games, fieldwork notes, television series, pornographic images and, centrally, the researchers’ Introduction 5 affective encounters with, and diverse attachments to, the texts in question. The authors work with ethnographic methods (Ahonen; Gregg; Laukkanen; Sundén), representational analysis (Rossi), close reading (Ahmed; Kyrölä; Liljeström; Pearce; Valovirta), as well as variations of close playing (Sundén) and close looking (Paasonen). As Koivunen points out in her chapter, the affective and ethical ‘turns’ in feminism are closely linked together in both their temporal proximity and their central concerns. In fact, the question of affect and feminist reading surfaces centrally as one of ethics and answerability. By approaching affect and analysis as intimately interconnected, this book underlines the role of the embodied and the sensory in and for acts of interpretation – the kinds of orientations, attachments and aversions that encounters with texts may give rise to, and the kinds of readings they facilitate. Acknowledgement This book builds on the research project (2004–7) and conference (2007) titled ‘Disturbing differences: Feminist readings of identity, location and power’. The project was funded by the Academy of Finland and directed by Marianne Liljeström at the Centre for Women’s Studies, University of Turku. Bibliography Ahmed, S. (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh University Press. Armstrong, I. (2000) The Radical Aesthetic, Oxford: Blackwell. Barad, K. (2003) ‘Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28: 801–31. Berlant, L. (ed.) (2000) Intimacy, University of Chicago Press. Braidotti, R. (2002) Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Cambridge: Polity Press. Clough, P. T. and Halley, J. (eds) (2007) The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, Durham: Duke University Press. Cvetkovich, A. (2003) An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, Durham: Duke University Press. Gallop, J. (1988) Thinking Through the Body, New York: Columbia University Press. hooks, b. (2000) Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, Boston: South End Press. Lupton, D. (1998) The Emotional Self: A Sociocultural Exploration, Thousand Oaks: Sage. Marks, L. U. (2002) Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Massumi, B. (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham: Duke University Press. Ngai, S. (2005) Ugly Feelings, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pearce, L. (1997) Feminism and the Politics of Reading, London: Arnold. Probyn, E. (2005) Blush: Faces of Shame, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 6 Liljeström and Paasonen Scott, J. W. (2001) ‘Millennial fantasies: The future of “gender” in the 21st century’, in C. Honegger and C. Arni (eds) Gender. Die Tuecken einer Kategorie. Joan W. Scott, Geschichte und Politik, Zürich: Chronos Verlag. Sedgwick, E. (2003) Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham: Duke University Press Sobchack, V. (2005) Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, Berkeley, CA: California University Press Introduction 7 1 Anaffective turn? Reimagining the subject of feminist theory Anu Koivunen Feminist theory, Teresa de Lauretis has argued, came ‘into its own’ through a self-conscious and self-critical redefinition of its key terms – subject, power and difference. In her account, it was ‘the feminist critique of feminism’ by women of colour and lesbians since the turn of the 1980s that made feminist theory possible and identifiable as feminist theory ‘rather than a feminist critique of some other theory or object-theory’ (de Lauretis 1990: 131). As a result of this critique, she maintained, the subject of feminism was reconceptualized as ‘shifting and multiply organized across variable axes of difference’, and social field redefined as ‘a tangle of distinct and variable relations of power and points of resistance’. These redefinitions were a result of feminist critique becoming conscious of itself, turning inwards and examining its own terms. In 1990, therefore, amid intensifying identity politics around issues of sexuality, ethnicity and ‘race’, de Lauretis proposed a notion of feminist theory, in the singular, as a ‘process of understanding’ and a ‘pursuit of consciousness’ (de Lauretis 1990: 116, 131). Mapping a historical legacy of ‘social and subjective transformation’ within feminist theory, de Lauretis linked together the 1970s’ practice of consciousness-raising, Adrienne Rich’s call for the ‘politics of location’, and ‘the theory in the flesh’ or ‘mestizaconsciousness’ proposed by Cherrié Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. Within such a frame, de Lauretis envisioned both the subject of feminism and the practice of feminist theory in terms of movement and self-displacement that is ‘concurrently social and subjective, internal and external, indeed political and personal’ (de Lauretis 1990: 116). While firmly rooted in poststructuralist notions of language and subjectivity, and foregrounding consciousness as a key term, the way in which de Lauretis characterizes the movement of feminist thought seems, in hindsight, to foresee the broad interest in the question of affect feminist scholarship would take from the 1990s onwards. In the fields of philosophy, history, literature, cinema studies, art history, media and cultural studies as well as in sociology, anthropology, politics and science studies, feminist scholars have turned to the question of affect and the topic of affectivity in search of a new critical vocabulary for investigating and conceptualizing the subject of feminism as embodied, located and relational. This search has been highly visible in the abundance of publications, conferences and course syllabi that across the humanities and social sciences have established the ‘affective life’ – affects, emotions, feelings, passions, moods and sentiments – as a new research area (Greco and Stenner 2008). Beyond a mere ‘hot topic’ (Woodward 1996), however, what has been termed ‘an affective turn’ (e.g. Koivunen 2001; Gibbs 2002; Clough and Halley 2007, 2008; Gorton 2008; Tyler 2008) is best viewed as a broad range of criticisms of the linguistic turn and its effects on feminist research. Importantly, it will be argued, a turn to affect can be detected both against and within the poststructuralist, social constructionist theories of subject and power. Affects have become an object of interest both as articulations of culture, language and ideology, and as a force field that questions scholarly investments in those terms. Furthermore, the ‘turn’ features both an individualist and anti-individualist thread. While the question of affect for many scholars is a question of epistemology and methodology and, therefore, an opportunity for increased personal and political accountability through ‘a lost language of emotion’ (Middleton 1992) or a rehabilitation of ‘the emotional self ’ (Lupton 1998), for others it reads as a possibility to move beyond the individual and personal, and to relocate critical attention from language, discourse and representations to the real, from body to matter, from cultures to nature, from identity to difference, from psychic to social. Whereas some view the concept of affect as a means to focus on the agency of the subject, others use it to displace the concept of subject and to radically rephrase the notion of agency itself. Whatever the focus, the affective turn is fuelled by a desire to renegotiate the critical currency of feminist thought. For some, the turn entails refining and complementing constructionist models and reworking the relations of the subjective and the social. For others, the turn is about new disciplinary alliances, most notably across the divide between human and natural sciences. To talk about an affective turn in the singular is to imply a shared agenda and sense of direction that does not do justice to the diversified field of feminists ‘working with affect’. This becomes all the more evident when focusing on the concept of affect, trying to locate the identity of the turn in a conceptual novelty, a shift from emotion or feeling to affect – a concept that beyond psychology or psychoanalysis, or as a term connoting physiological processes, was hardly used in the social sciences or humanities until the 1990s. In one contemporary reading, ‘emotion refers to cultural and social expression, whereas affects are of biological and physiological nature’ (Probyn 2005: 11). Such conceptual division can be seen to reflect disciplinary preferences: the humanities and social sciences, those studying cognition, social expression and interpretation of cultures traditionally use ‘emotion’, whereas the sciences, those studying the brain and the body, privilege ‘affect’ as a term (Probyn 2005: xv). There is, however, little agreement on these definitions. In Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the notion of affect is vague, referring to necessary states of pain and pleasure, to unmeasurable and inner-directed An affective turn? 9