![]() ![]() You can access the article and the entire issue here. The issue also includes an article by Public Feelings Salon panelist Tavia Nyong’o and comments from Lauren Berlant as part of a roundtable discussion with Judith Butler, Isabell Lorey, and others. Casid’s essay has been published in a special issue of TDR on “Precarity and Performance,” guest edited by Rebecca Schneider and Nicholas Ridout (TDR 56:4 T216 Winter 2012). And you can also join the conversation when it continues on our blog in January 2013 at /bcrw-blog.Īn expanded version of Jill H. You can read their responses here, plus a reply by Berlant. ![]() The discussion was so lively and rich, we decided to extend it by inviting more scholars and activists to chime in. This interactive conversation, moderated by Janet Jakobsen, features Lauren Berlant, José Muñoz, Ann Pellegrini and Tavia Nyong’o. Feminist theorists have contributed profoundly to the current field of affect studies.Just as feminism has sought to identify the ways in which the personal and the political are linked, the study of “public feelings” draws our attention to how and why feelings and emotion (assumed to be a private, personal experience) influence politics and notions of social belonging and intimacy. 1 There is also a familiar gendered dimension of this shadowy place for human feelings-a distinctly feminine one (Lutz 1986). Put simply, if the "base" of all social formations is anchored in relations of production, emotion and feeling occupy the ephemeral, epiphenomenal reaches of "super-structure," somewhere on the fringes of culture and ideology. Emotion has long held an ambivalent place in the social sciences, especially those anchored in the tradition of political economy. The current groundswell of emotion, affect, and feelings (and distinctions drawn between these related states) has also been captivating the attention of scholars across many fields, from literature and philosophy to economics, geography, and anthropology. The manner in which feelings are incited, produced, and exchanged in the marketplace and in the psyches and embodied experiences of individuals has become an integral part of late capitalism. In this case, the optimistic attachment to the pursuit of an academic career is life-giving (giving doctoral researchers and graduates a goal to work. Not only are emotions running high across the international political stage, but feelings are explicitly mobilized and exchanged in virtually every sphere of economic, social, cultural, and personal life. Under cruel optimism, affect theorist Lauren Berlant argues, good life fantasies which give your life meaning or enable you to add up to something also impede upon your wellbeing. I read within these Barbadian desires (and even within their disappointments) a profound optimism, pleasure, and bold self-discovery that does not only/always succumb to despair. In a society known more for its conservative 'stiff-upper lip' and 'grin-and-bear-it' demeanor, 'tough love,' and material, transactional modes of support and exchange than expressions of intimate affection, I chart a growing desire for new modes of feeling, a growing cultural pull toward romantic love and intimacy, and emotional expressivity itself. I turn to the specific context of the post-colonial Caribbean island of Barbados, where a new surge in desires for intimacy, emotional expressiveness, and affective life is bound up within the 21 st century thrust of neoliberal entrepreneurialism. In this essay, I suggest that feminist ethnographic analysis requires a more complex account of affective pursuits. Strikingly, feminist affect theory in particular interprets a fundamental cruelty at the core of cultural demands for optimism (Berlant 2011) or happiness (Ahmed 2010), a dark underbelly that forecloses any other transformative outcomes. ![]() Yet much of the scholarship on neoliberalism has focused squarely upon the extractive and exhausting quality of contemporary affective life. Indeed, the intensity with which feelings traverse these boundaries of individual-social-cultural-political-economic life is arguably a defining feature of our times. Positive feelings are also increasingly demanded and exchanged in the capitalist marketplace, including care and empathy, tenderness and affection. Anger, disgust, and anxiety abound in the public sphere and in social analyses. ![]()
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