ABSTRACT
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 meta-
phors 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? Reimagin-
ing 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.
