"Beyond the "Feeling Woman

Beyond the "Feeling Woman": Feminist Implications of Affect Studies Naomi Greyser Books Discussed in This Article Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP's Fight against AIDS. By Deborah B. Gould. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Ugly Feelings. By Sianne Ngai. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. The Promise of Happiness. By Sarah Ahmed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory. By Clare Hemmings. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Object Lessons: Readings in U.S. Identity Knowledges. By Robyn Wiegman. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Feminist theory is filled with passion and with passionate attachments. Their expression forms the very stuff of feminist language, makes feminist theory alive. —Clare Hemmings, Why Stories Matter FeministStudies38, no. 1 (Spring 2012). © 2012 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 84 Naomi Greyser 85 In October 2007, a colleague and I drove to the "Conference on Polit ical Feeling" at the University of Chicago. Her puppy, sporting a pink cast on her broken forefoot, came along. The conference was on "the polit ical as a space of affective ... disruption and attachment" and Aisha the wounded puppy evoked many a sympathetic sigh from conference partic ipants. When she chewed a stick to shreds during a panel, she also earned some dirty looks. My colleague and I joked she was the poster puppy of the conference. She reminded us that objects of sympathy are vexed by the cultural, as dogs often show up as pests rather than pets in econom ically challenged areas. Aisha's refreshing yet inappropriate presence also threw into relief the contrast between the often-anaesthetized zone of the academy and breathing, discombobulating life. Sweet and disruptive, Aisha became an animal archive of the humorous, hopeful, and some times absurd and uncomfortable misalignments that comprise the field of affect studies. Affect studies, vibrant and dissolute, happens under a number of headings, from history of emotions to "biomedia studies" to "the new pathos" to the "affective turn." It takes shape across fields, from cognitive psychology to communication studies to political science to the history of medicine. Feminism, gender and sexuality, alongside race and post coloniality, crucially intersect with this research. In this essay, I consider what is at stake for feminism in alfect studies as well as what feminism offers affect studies. Affect has posed a problem for feminist studies, given the history of femininity's overassociation with emotions as well as the history of psychoanalysis's complex entanglements with both sexism and feminism. One response to these problems for many feminized subjects has been to clamp down on the personal in academic or public arenas because it threatens to undermine or delegitimate scholarly pursuits. It has been challenging for many feminists to hold open space for affect without feeling essentialized by it and while still subjecting it to critical inquiry. I consider a number of interlinked arguments in and about affect studies in relation to feminism. First, affect studies is rethinking the place of the person and personal in scholarship, formulating ways to account for our experiences beyond solipsistic recitation of our positionalities and 86 Naomi Greyser their epistemic limitations. Second, affect studies argues that emotions are hard to define, and fluctuates between responding to this difficulty with new and improved etymologies and with critiques of existing systems. Third, affect studies treats psychoanalysis as a crucial resource but not the ultimate authority on emotion, and attempts to delaminate affect from that tradition's political problems. Finally, affect studies is divided about whether it ought to develop a science to diagnose and control emotion or remind us about the difficulty of doing so under any conditions, most of all politically charged ones. Within affect studies, many scholars distinguish between affect and emotion. Throughout this essay, I move between these terms. Usually, schol ars regard affect as embodied and consider emotion to be narrated and social. Yet there is slippage between these terms because it is hard to main tain distinctions between bodily "intensities" and social categories of feel ing. When we track it, the slippery distinction between affect and emotion becomes productive, because slips between the self and the social animate the field and are crucial to feminism

Affect (linguistics) · Affect theory · Feeling · Happiness · Passion · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Puppy · Sociology · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Rhetoric and Communication Studies · Social Psychology

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