Affective Narrative Inquiry (ANI) as Diagrammatic Practice

Following Conservative Media’s Affective Uptake of the United States Women’s National Soccer Team in Contemporary Culture Wars

Bibliographic Data

ID19225347
AuthorsDonka Darpatova‐hruzewicz (0000-0002-3032-5944, Uniwersytet SWPS, corresponding author)
Year2026
Publication date2026-05-21
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCulture Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1532-7086 • E-ISSN: 1552-356X
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/15327086261454639
OpenAlexW7161976926
LanguageEN
References cited21

This article develops Affective Narrative Inquiry (ANI) as a diagrammatic practice for tracing affect as it circulates across media, audiences, and political imaginaries. Focussing on conservative coverage of the United States Women’s National Soccer Team (USWNT) from 1999 to 2024, it follows how admiration is progressively reorganised into irritation, hostility, and moral condemnation within contemporary culture wars. Drawing on Ahmed’s affective economies and Bakhtinian dramaturgy, the analysis approaches news articles and comment threads as co-performed narrative assemblages. Across four dramaturgical acts and interludes, ANI maps how pride, resentment, and outrage attach to figures, gestures, and symbols, becoming portable judgements that begin to precede events themselves. The USWNT emerges as an affective surface through which anxieties about gender, nationalism, feminism, and authority are worked. ANI is offered as a methodological contribution for studying affective circulation without treating affect as a stable meaning to decode

Admiration · Affect (linguistics) · Diagrammatic reasoning · Meaning (existential) · Narrative · Outrage · Media Influence and Health · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

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