ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author attempts to contend with the overwhelm that resulted from the confluence of COVID-19, the neoliberal academy, and her own desire to pursue success. Drawing on Berlant's notion of cruel optimism, the author engages with what she calls fragments of affect, which work across the ways in which thought is disciplined and experience is segregated in the neoliberal academy, disrupting divisions between the professional and the personal, the scholarly and the mundane, the authoritative and the entertaining. These moments of overwhelm are presented as short vignettes that sometimes occurred only once, sometimes happened over a period of days or weeks, and sometimes were refrains of affective experience that seemed to occur continuously or come in waves as she explored failing (or succeeding) to be a proper neoliberal subject. By exploring the overwhelm as a part of the affective terrain of transdisciplinary feminist work, the author seeks to revision overwhelm as a condition of possibility with the necessary destruction of the idealized good life as the path to that possibility.
