ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of affect theory’s approach to aesthetics. Affect theory recovers the importance of sensation to the analysis of art, literature, and culture. Broadly, it understands affect as a current of potential that infuses every physical body. Affect theory draws fresh attention to the affects that aesthetic objects unleash within the bodies of readers and spectators. Through these affects, art reshapes the structures of feeling that organize the social world. Affect theory is often critiqued for romanticizing irrational formlessness. However, this chapter demonstrates the centrality of aesthetic form to affect theory, particularly its conceptions of agency and relationality. To do so, it draws attention to the “unfolding scene,” which narrates a crisis in affective and social relationality. The chapter illuminates unfolding scenes in two contemporary kinship narratives: Midsommar (2019) and Detransition, Baby (2021). Within these texts, the unfolding scene gives aesthetic form to the fraught affective and political relations of queer and trans belonging.
