The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship
... Insbesondere schließen aktuelle affekttheoretische Arbeiten -wenngleich meist unausgewiesen und implizit -an jene feministischen Debatten an, die das Politische im (vermeintlich) Privaten und Persönlichen herausgearbeitet und damit wesentliche Grundsteine für ein Verständnis des Verhältnisses von Politik und Affekt gelegt haben (z. B. Lorde 2007Lorde [1984 ;Berlant 1997;Sauer 1999;Ahmed 2004;Cvetkovich 2012). Deren Ziel war es, gerade die Verschränkungen zwischen dem Privaten und dem Öffentlichen, zwischen dem Psychischen und dem Sozialen sowie zwischen verkörperten Erfahrungen und gesellschaftlichen Strukturen aufzuzeigen. ...
... Die politische Abwertung von Gefühlen sowie die Zuschreibungen von Emotionalität und Irrationalität korrespondieren dabei auf vielfache Weise mit den ineinander verschränkten Abwertungen in Bezug auf Geschlecht, Sexualität, race und Klasse (z. B. Lorde 2007Lorde [1984 ;Berlant 1997;Skeggs 1997;Cvetkovich 2003a;Ahmed 2004;Stoler 2009;Palmer 2017). Die emotional(isiert)en Topoi des ‚irrationalen barbarischen Mobs', der ‚sexuell zügellosen Schwarzen Frau' oder der "feminist killjoy" (Ahmed 2010, 50) sind nur einige Beispiele, die bis in die Gegenwart fortwirken. ...
... Yakınlığa ilişkin literatürde öne çıkan çalışmalar için bkz:Berlant, 1997;Layder, 2009;Povinelli, 2006;Stoler, 2006;Zengin, 2024. ...
Bu çalışma yakınlık kavramını aile özelinde ele alarak modern ailenin yakınlık olarak kurulmasının biyopolitik görünümlerini sunmayı amaçlamaktadır. Bu sebeple ilk olarak, Michel Foucault’nun biyopolitika kuramı ile ilişkili olarak özel hayatın işleyişindeki dönüşümü gösteren tarihçilere referansla, ailenin yakınlık olarak kurulmasının politik ve tarihsel süreçleri izlenmiştir. Bu süreçlerin biyopolitik bağlamları iki temel eksen üzerinde tartışılmıştır. Ayrıcalıklı biçimde aile yakınlığına sahip olabilecekler ve bunların oluşturdukları ailenin biçimleri ve yakınlığın eşitsiz dağılımı ilk ekseni; ailenin yakınlık olarak özel alana yerleştirilmesi ve mahremiyet söyleminin aile içi şiddet ve istismar biçimleriyle ilişkilendirilmesi ikinci ekseni oluşturmaktadır. İlk tartışma ekseninde, “kimler aile olabilir” sorusuna yanıt aranırken, bu yanıtların asimetrik işleyişlerine ışık tutulmuştur. İkinci tartışma ekseninde ise, ailenin yakınlık olarak kurulmasına ilişkin iktidar teknikleriyle, yakınlığın nasıl aile içi şiddete imkân verme ve örtü olma stratejileri sunduğunun izleri sürülmüştür.
... Este abordaje resulta especialmente útil a la hora de indagar en las formas de proximidad y distancia que establecemos con otrxs humanxs y no humanxs y los tipos de proximidad que nos damos a partir de lo que es incentivado y prohibido sentir hacia esxs otrxs. Así, la compasión hacia la infancia regula mucho de lo que nos es posible en el estar-con y en el hacer-con ella porque ubica a lxs niñxs siempre en una posición sufriente, de necesidad y vulnerabilidad frente a una adultez que es llamada a ofrecerse en su ayuda como ser superior, carente de fragilidad y por ello en la obligación de indicarle cómo vivir(Edelman, 2014;Berlant, 1997).De la mano de las teorías queer/cuir(Saxe, 2021), el abordaje afectivo nos hace ver las huellas que dejaron los costosos procesos de Revista Punto Género N.º 22, diciembrede 2024de ISSN 2735de -7473 / 413-454 https://doi.org/10.5354/2735de -7473.2024 ...
El objetivo del presente artículo es realizar un análisis del vínculo entre niñas y adultas del centro comunitario La Caldera a la luz de la categoría de amistad en clave feminista, en pos de desnaturalizar los formatos relacionales impuestos entre generaciones, que tienen como característica fundante la desigualdad jerárquica. Esta investigación etnográfica ha sido realizada durante 2020 en el seno de aquella organización política, que reunió en su accionar a adultas con niñas y adolescentes de distintas clases sociales. Los resultados del estudio de los registros de campo se presentan en tres ejes que permiten desglosar las características del afecto surgido intergeneracionalmente: en tanto forma de hacer lazo con la alteridad sin pretensiones de mismidad, en tanto forma de cuidado no paternalista y no unidireccional, y en tanto forma de pasar el tiempo conjuntamente sin una tarea específica, o sea, como pausa del tiempo productivo.
... Drawing together a range of cultural theorists, Fassin and Rechtman (2009) highlight that Cvetkovich (2003) surfaces how the emergence of a 'trauma culture' has been read as problematic in a number of different ways, but fundamentally because a focus on trauma carries the potential to misrecognise (and therefore divert attention away from) structural conditions of oppression as feelings. On different but related trajectories, Wendy Brown (2009) has questioned the efficacy of identity politics when demands on the state are made through the lens of victimhood; Mark Seltzer (1998) describes a growing public obsession with 'wound culture' that turns violence into spectacle and consumption; while Lauren Berlant (1997) has developed the notion of 'citizen trauma' to describe the competitive and persuasive public rhetoric around 'misrecognition in everyday life' which can act to obscure 'basic differences among modes of identity, hierarchy, and violence'. Lauren Berlant's point is that 'mass national pain threatens to turn into banality, a crumbling archive of dead signs and tired plots' (Berlant 1997, p 2). ...
Trauma as a concept, a signifier and a frame has become increasingly visible in archival theory and praxis in recent years. A shift that is perhaps unsurprising given that society at large appears to have embraced trauma as a major interpretative category for our age. The recent spotlight on trauma can also be linked to accompanying movements in our discourse as we have begun to unpack and theorise the affective dimensions of records work and have moved towards more person-centred approaches. While the recent introduction of trauma-informed approaches to our field is a welcome development in many ways, this article seeks to critically engage with the Western concept of trauma to expose its intellectual lineages and the social and moral economies that have shaped its emergence in different spheres; and highlight how archival studies discourse on trauma is shaped in relation to different branches of Western trauma discourse. This article argues that as archivists and records workers adopt the language of trauma from adjacent arenas as an explanatory and transformative frame, it is vital that we do so in possession of an understanding of trauma’s conceptual legacies and in conversation with broader affective, liberatory and reparative framings. The article is written in the spirit of becoming truly ‘trauma-informed’.
... She lifts her knees,italics in the original]), complicated with her status as a minor ('Twelve, not ten. Soon, thirteen') produces her as a visible body, the live zones of sexual infraction which then becomes, as Lauren Berlant (1997) notes for post-Raeganite America, the zone for citizen action which would remove this hypervisibility, normalise the minor subject and produce 'dead' citizenship. Maya becomes that subject on whom the citizen-Debashish Panickershould exert himself, that subject where citizenship comes alive because here the citizenship status has to be actively administered, making itself vulnerable to resistance. ...
The novel form has been traced as contemporaneous with the nation-state form and is associated with a homogenous speaking community. This article concerns itself with the role of affect in sustaining a community in a condition in which the distinction between the agent of capital and that of community is not unconditionally or ahistorically available. Drawing its theoretical apparatus from the conceptualisation of post colony by Achille Mbembe, and on studies of rumour, and contextualising itself in the contractual labour practice known as kafala and the exclusionary practices of citizenship in the countries of the Arab Gulf, this article argues that the reproduction of the exploitative capital/state along the axes of community produces both the capital/state and the community along affective lines, and away from the bureaucratic coldness or democratic openness that is supposed to characterise them. Taking Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People, as an instance of a novel produced from such a milieu, the article pays attention to the figure of the reader because traditionally scholarship has put the onus of the effects of the novel such as nationalism as the affordance of the figure of the reader. The article illustrates reconfigurations in the form of the novel and suggests that it is through fallibility rather than efficiency that power operates both as oppressive and resistant.
... See Holman (2018a: 185216). 6 Such a "reparative" understanding of queerness resonates with the work of authors such as Anzaldúa (1987); Berlant (1997); and Sedgwick (2003). ...
This paper reconsiders conflict between the great and the plebs in Machiavelli from a perspective of "queer utopia". The paper maintains that confrontation between the great and the plebs is best understood as a clash between two principles: repetition and inertia versus creativity and action. When the plebeian utopian impulse to be free from the oppression of the great is appropriately excited and expressed as an incessant yearning for the new, the queer political agency that is unleashed results in production of alternative possibilities of living and being in the world that make the society freer and stronger.
... Una circunstancia que, como la genealogía del feminismo se ha encargado de subrayar, responde a una lógica de género (y sin duda también colonial) que denigra lo femenino y subalterniza a todo el repertorio de sus réplicas simbólicas. (Ahmed, 2015, p. 11) En línea con la propia Ahmed (2015), las aportaciones de las pensadoras feministas y queer (Spelman, 1989;Jaggar, 1996;Butler, 1997;Berlant, 1997) resultan extremadamente valiosas porque "nos han mostrado que las emociones 'importan' para la política" (p. 38) y que estas han sido utilizadas por las fuerzas hegemónicas como formas de sometimiento sobre los cuerpos femeninos. ...
Los estudios del afecto se aproximan críticamente, desde disciplinas tan heterogéneas como la psicología, la filosofía o la neurociencia, a los afectos y las emociones en tanto que estas se encuentran vinculadas al ser humano y a su interacción, percepción y entendimiento del entorno sociocultural que le rodea. En este contexto, pueden señalarse como exponentes de la corriente a Tomkins (1962), Damasio (2011), Sedgwick (2003) o Massumi (2002). No obstante, para edificar el entramado teórico de esta aportación, se toma como punto de partida el trabajo pionero de Sarah Ahmed en La política cultural de las emociones (2015). En su obra, Sarah realiza un análisis de las economías afectivas examinando la emocionalidad presente en una serie de textos de dominio público, en su mayoría discursos mediáticos en torno a diversas problemáticas políticas y sociales. Para ello, reflexiona acerca del funcionamiento de las emociones sobre los cuerpos individuales y colectivos y subraya la importancia de la dimensión social (o como ella lo denomina, socialidad) de dichas emociones. Sostiene, por tanto, un juicio contra la privatización de las emociones, así como una crítica al modelo de estructura social imperante, que las desestima reiteradamente. Toda esta articulación conceptual comienza a gestarse a partir de los años 80, cuando en el seno de las humanidades y ciencias sociales se experimenta un cambio de paradigma hacia lo emocional. Para dilucidar el germen de esta redirección, Mónica Greco y Paul Stenner (2008) señalan, por una parte, la estela del pensamiento posestructuralista y, por otra, la recurrente presencia de regímenes de sentimentalidad en campos tan diversos como los medios de comunicación, el sistema sanitario o la política. Así, desde disciplinas como la antropología, la sociología o los estudios literarios, las emociones empiezan a ser consideradas críticamente y a aportar contribuciones diferentes a las acuñadas por la psicología a lo largo de la historia. Esta revisión afectiva implica, además, la apuesta teórica y revaloración de problemáticas tradicionalmente asociadas al género femenino y, por ello, denostadas: "las emociones están vinculadas a las mujeres, a quienes se representa como 'más cercanas' a la naturaleza, gobernadas por los apetitos, y menos capaces de trascender el cuerpo a través del pensamiento, la voluntad y el juicio" (p. 22). En este sentido, en su prólogo, Helena López González de Orduña señala:
... Discussions of sexual citizenship through the lens of colonialism (Alexander 1994;Puri et al. 2014) and racism (Cahill 2010;Ferguson 2018) draw attention to the ways in which normative sexual inscriptions function through the body. Read together, these assessments amount to the wider critique of sexual citizenship as a normative project of assimilation (Berlant 1997;Richardson and Monro 2012). ...
... A notable body of research has built around the project: drawing on the now extensive PostSecret collection, scholars have probed the social meanings of confession (McNeill, 2014), the intimacies of anonymity (Poletti, 2011), the curation of authenticity (Smirnova, 2016), and the remediation of the physical artefact online (Poletti, 2020;Prutzer, 2016). Drawing on Berlant's (1997) notion of the intimate public in analysing the collection, Poletti (2011, pp. 26-27) argues that 'members of the intimate public of PostSecret "hear" each others' [sic] confessions, and confess themselves, to gain access to an experience of belonging and to confirm their emotional literacy in the keeping of secrets'. ...
Queering the Map ( queeringthemap.com ) is a novel digital platform: a storymap, an anonymous collaborative record, an archive of queer experiences. To contribute to the platform, visitors make their own mark by clicking on an empty space on the map. As to what visitors contribute, the platform’s About section suggests, simply, ‘If it counts for you, then it counts for Queering the Map’. In this article, we probe this guiding principle. What does count in this context? What matters in the queer archive? Drawing on interviews with 14 site users and an analysis of nearly 2000 stories pinned to Australia on the map, we consider what platform practices reveal about queer collective memory-making, to illuminate the how and why of a queer archive. We see that relatability matters because of the affective, affirming and community-building seeds it can generate; situation matters because it is through participatory practices that recognition, visibility and community place- making are enacted; and, the everyday matters as the archive’s visitors collectively claim and gift their varied personal experiences. Through these themes we explore queer contributions or how site visitors are oriented towards giving something of themselves to the archive. We discuss how archival properties of the platform are key to (queer) participation, and to meaning-making – as distinct, as queer, as a valued record. Queering the Map, we argue, is significant in how space is made for queer representation, carving new contours for archival ‘evidence’ and community histories.
Otoriter siyasetin yükselen trendi olan sağ popülist rejimler ve aşırı sağ, tüm ideolojiler gibi cinsiyetlendirilmiştir ve cinsiyetçidir. Ancak gerek neoliberalizmin zorunlulukları gerekse de otoriterleşmenin yeni versiyonunun demokrasi ile kurduğu girift ilişki, bu rejimlerin kadınlarla kurduğu ilişkiyi baskı/zor ile sınırlamaz ve kadınlarla yakınlaşır. Yakınlaşmanın temelini kadın haklarını araçsallaştırmakta bulan otoriter rejimler, kadınlara özellikle yönetimlerinin ilk yıllarında belirli haklar tanır. Bu, otoriter siyasetin kadınlarla kurduğu yakınlığın ilk boyutudur. İkinci boyut, bu siyasetin içinde yer alan ve sisteme entegre olmuş kadınlarla ilgilidir. Yeni otoriterlikler, birçok kadını örgütlenmesinin içine alır; hatta çok sayıda kadın, bu siyasi yapılanmalara liderlik eder. Otoriter siyasetin kadın haklarıyla kurduğu diğer yakınlaşma, aşırı sağın ırkçı ve İslamofobik siyasasıyla kadınların haklarında kayıp yaşanacağına dair algı üretmesinden doğar. Kimi feministlerin de destek verdiği bu yakınlaşma, literatürde femonasyonalizm olarak adlandırılmaktadır. Bu makaleyle hedeflenen, günümüz otoriter siyasetinin kadınlarla kurduğu ilişkilerin ve yakınlıkların farklı boyutlarına dikk
This article critically examines the failures of consent as the dominant form of contemporary sexual ethics by drawing on feminist new materialism and Lauren Berlant’s theory of cruel optimism using a political economic lens. I make the case that sexual consent is built on capitalist property relations that are raced, gendered and classed and thus needs to be challenged. Drawing on formative critique, historical analysis and case studies, and engagement with media coverage, this article makes the case for change and offers two possible ways forward, one rooted in Lauren Berlant’s work on sexual relationality and another in the form of a pleasure and care-centred ethic of embodied and relational sexual Otherness .
Thinking through the affective interconnection between bodies and spaces, this chapter analyses Istiklal Street as an ethnographic ‘site’ exposing the historicity of social struggles for rights. It analyses the ‘right to be in the street,’ that is, in a street that hosts demonstrations and protests every day, echoing demands for recognition and belonging, as well as differently projected affects, desires and hopes. It examines the importance of sustaining political alliances at the heart of an urban space encompassing the tension created between a secular polity and Islamic piety, between neoliberal economic projects and multicultural politics of tolerance, and between severe policing and other forms of violence. Focusing on the 2009 Pride March, it explains that this street also reflects the common struggle of many other activists to secure a political ‘space’ where their demands against violence, suffering, oppression and discrimination, as well as their different desires, will not be silenced.
Time is of increasing concern in Black studies, with scholars studying the ways in which standardized narratives of time are historically imposed on racialized populations. This essay reads Safiya Sinclair’s 2016 poetry collection Cannibal as offering a fugitive temporality that ruptures the stability of the racializing present. In Cannibal, Sinclair’s speaker does not attempt to release herself from the racializing condemnation of the past. Rather, she summons a fugitive social past in the present, antagonizing the homogeneity of the present by exposing it to the repressed and relegated wounds that haunt the foundations of modernity’s racializing program. In Cannibal, this summoning is occasioned through a practice of faith. Following J. Kameron Carter and Fred Moten, among others, this essay studies the ways in which this fugitive poetic temporality of faith builds on contemporary developments in the critique of time, religion, and whiteness in Black studies.
Muchas narrativas teológicas se emplean actualmente para legitimar tanto la exclusión y segregación de las personas LGBTIQ+ como el genocidio del pueblo palestino; estas problemáticas representan un desafío considerable tanto para la academia teológica como para los estudios sobre diversidades sexo-genéricas, en cuanto a las consecuencias de los discursos fundamentalistas que difunden dichas narrativas. Este artículo examina estas cuestiones en el contexto del actual conflicto en Palestina, desde dos grandes partes: en primer lugar, analiza el fundamentalismo, entendido como un envenenamiento religioso y teológico, para explorar las interpretaciones teológicas perjudiciales que han sido utilizadas para justificar actos de violencia extrema, perpetuando un ciclo de odio y exclusión; en segundo lugar, estudia la homonormatividad desde su rol en la consolidación de la unidad nacional, abordando la configuración del homonacionalismo y su relación con el pinkwashing del proyecto colonial israelí. El artículo concluye que las luchas por la justicia social y la liberación deben abordarse de manera integral y no fragmentada. Las narrativas y prácticas de liberación queer/cuir/maricas, tanto desde una perspectiva teológica como socio-política, deben estar conectadas con la ruptura de pactos cis-heteropatriarcales, la descolonización y la construcción de comunidades solidarias.
Many theological narratives are currently employed to legitimize both the exclusion and segregation of LGBTIQ+ people and the genocide of the Palestinian people; these issues present a considerable challenge to both theological scholarship and gender diversity studies in terms of the consequences of fundamentalist discourses that disseminate such narratives. This paper examines these issues in the context of the ongoing conflict in Palestine, from two broad thematic perspectives: first, it analyzes fundamentalism, understood as religious and theological poisoning, to explore the harmful theological interpretations that have been used to justify acts of extreme violence, perpetuating a cycle of hatred and exclusion; second, it studies homonormativity from its role in the consolidation of national unity, addressing the configuration of homonationalism and its relationship to the pinkwashing of the Israeli colonial project. The paper concludes that struggles for social justice and liberation must be approached in a holistic rather than fragmented manner. Queer/cuir/maricas liberation narratives and practices, from both a theological and socio
Este artigo trata das operacionalizações das teorias dos afetos em sua relação com as festas de música eletrônica, em uma perspectiva do Sul Global. O objetivo é compreender as composições coletivas e singulares oportunizadas pelo encontro com a música, enquanto elemento intensificador de afetos, assim como dos trabalhos necessários para o agenciamento desses afetos. A partir de uma metodologia de inspiração etnográfica e de um movimento exploratório que inclui observação e entrevistas informais, discutimos trabalho, os circuitos afetivos e cenas musicais em uma análise piloto da festa de 5 anos do Coletivo T, de Porto Alegre, no sul do Brasil. Assim, a discussão sobre festas, corporalidades e espaços da cidade é realizada a partir de uma arqueologia da cena de música eletrônica na cidade, que desemboca em um circuito distinto de seu início, trazendo rupturas e continuidades em relação às estéticas e identidades desses eventos e seus participantes.
Resumen: Muchas narrativas teológicas se emplean actualmente para legitimar tanto la exclusión y segregación de las personas LGBTIQ+ como el genocidio del pueblo palestino; estas problemáticas representan un desafío considerable para la academia teológica y los estudios sobre diversidades sexo-genéricas, en lo relacionado con las consecuencias de los discursos fundamentalistas que difunden dichas narrativas. Este artículo examina estas cuestiones en el contexto del actual conflicto en Palestina, desde dos grandes partes: en primer lugar, analiza el fundamentalismo, entendido como envenenamiento religioso y teológico, para explorar las interpretaciones teológicas perjudiciales que han sido utilizadas para justificar actos de violencia extrema, perpetuando un ciclo de odio y exclusión; en segundo lugar, estudia la homonormatividad desde su rol en la consolidación de la unidad nacional, abordando la configuración del homonacionalismo y su relación con el pinkwashing del proyecto colonial israelí. El artículo concluye que las luchas por la justicia social y la liberación deben abordarse de manera integral y no fragmentada. Las narrativas y prácticas de liberación queer/cuir/maricas, tanto desde una perspectiva teológica como socio-política, deben estar conectadas con la ruptura de pactos cis-heteropatriarcales, la descolonización y la construcción de comunidades solidarias.
Palabras clave: Palestina, Fundamentalismo religioso, Sionismo, Homonormatividad, Pinkwashing, Israel.
Abstract: Many theological narratives are currently employed to legitimize both the exclusion and segregation of LGBTIQ+ people and the genocide of the Palestinian people; these issues present a considerable challenge to both theological scholarship and gender diversity studies in terms of the consequences of fundamentalist discourses that disseminate such narratives. This paper examines these issues in the context of the ongoing conflict in Palestine, from two broad thematic perspectives: first, it analyzes fundamentalism, understood as religious and theological poisoning, to explore the harmful theological interpretations that have been used to justify acts of extreme violence, perpetuating a cycle of hatred and exclusion; second, it studies homonormativity from its role in the consolidation of national unity, addressing the configuration of homonationalism and its relationship to the pinkwashing of the Israeli colonial project. The paper concludes that struggles for social justice and liberation must be approached in a holistic rather than fragmented manner. Queer/ cuir/maricas liberation narratives and practices, from both a theological and socio- political perspective, must be connected to cis-heteropatriarchal covenant-breaking, decolonization, and solidarity community building.
Keywords: Palestine, Religious fundamentalism, Zionism, Homonormativity, Pinkwashing, Israel.
The critical consensus around Ishiro Honda’s 1954 Godzilla is widely known: the creature is a metaphor for Japan’s midcentury national traumas, including firebombing, nuclear violence, and Japan’s own war crimes. This essay examines Gareth Edwards’ 2014 Godzilla, arguing that the film both draws heavily on the original’s visual darkness (both films feature sequences of night-time destruction and chiaroscuro contrast, for instance) and substantially modifies the conceptual commitments of the creature. Where Honda’s original was a warning about the perils of unfettered political sovereignty – the horrors unleashed by modern war – Edwards’ reboot emphasizes the demonstration of Godzilla’s worldly authority over all other monsters. No longer a critique of the excesses of power, the contemporary incarnation of Godzilla is an embodiment of the natural rightness of violently enforced hierarchy. Visual darkness is key to this political shift: Godzilla 2014 uses darkness to reference the visual style of the original and to emphasize its ‘serious’ take on the monster genre, to be sure, but what is more, its commitment to a ‘gritty’, desaturated, ‘realist’ war-movie visual style aligns the remake with a set of drastically different political positions to those of the original.
This article analyzes affective representations of the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s in the U.S. in Mike Nichols’ adaptation of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (2003), and in Ryan Murphy’s adaptation of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (2014). The core approach is affect theory applied to cultural studies. I argue that throughout a period of government inaction towards an unknown and deadly virus, art was a means of engaging with the activist and social movements of the time that further propelled the fight against AIDS and aimed at changing public perceptions. The affects depicted in these works engage questions of belonging and citizenship, leading to an overview of how portrayals of the epidemic help make sense of the notions of affective and intimate citizenship.
There is no doubt that the writing of Lauren Berlant is influential in media and cultural studies as well as across gender and feminist studies and other work in critical, cultural and materialist traditions. Given the complexity of Berlant’s work and its integral refusal of taxonomic and hegemonic terms, it can be difficult for the reader to coherently grasp the singularity of even their most powerful concepts. This essay attempts to think with Berlant’s conceptualisation of genre without displacing the concept from their work through representational summarisation. The essay is part close reading, part exegesis and part experimentation – I hope just as Berlant would have wished. Rather than aim for an even description that accounts for Berlant’s various interventions in a measured way, the method of this essay is to think-write with the ellipsis, to undertake a translation that puts to one side the fantasy of mastery but still seeks to deepen our understanding of the intended meaning of Berlant’s texts. For Berlant, intended meanings would be about what something brings into the world. At minimum, this is my best effort at partaking in a cultural studies pedagogy that foregrounds the practice of critical thinking as world making. The essay then offers an invitation to the reader to learn from Berlant’s work about what the theoretical concept of genre can do. Just as this abstract does, the essay moves in and out of convention, where the sociality of affect does its work to congeal, to disturb, to make sense and make senseless. To move on.
This essay engages with Lauren Berlant’s scholarship by considering its contributions to media theory. Despite Berlant’s beloved following and many key impacts on critical theory, affect theory, and otherwise, media theory is not typically among the first things that come to mind about her work. By reading Berlant’s interest in affect as conceptually homologous with the interest of more material media theorists in media as conditions of being, the essay raises the possibility that affect theory is a variation of media theory, which would make Berlant a key media theorist in disguise.
Lauren Berlant’s contributions chart innovative conceptual frameworks to help us understand how affect and emotion, desires and hopes traverse the public and private realms. However, rather surprisingly, Berlant’s work does not engage directly with explorations of digital culture and its effects, nor has it been used extensively in the analysis of digital culture. We begin by updating Berlant’s descriptions of how we think about the contemporary culture of ‘crises’ (2011), drawing on recent documentations to illustrate the interconnected phenomena of “epidemics of loneliness” and isolation in the face of uncertainties of the historical present. To address those gaps, we then explore how cruel optimism and intimate publics have been taken up in studies of digital and social media. We will conclude by addressing how these concepts, as well as Berlant’s most recent work on the inconvenience of others, can best be engaged to help navigate and theorize digital culture. Finally, we take up their 2022 work to explore the crises of polarization as a manifestation of loneliness, through the lens of inconvenience. In conclusion, we will suggest how Berlant’s concepts provide valuable insight for further studies of digital culture.
In this article, I show how Berlant offers important resources for thinking about the relationship between affect, mediation and global nationalism, and for considering how to build alternative forms of belonging. These resources include: how they address people’s sense of belonging to an affective space, and how they map the affective states that form part of living in the present under late capitalism. In these ways, Berlant offers material for helping us understand why nationalist ways of understanding belonging should appear so persistent, and continue to provide convincing narratives of attachment. The article goes on to outline methodological approaches pursued by Berlant, which I suggest others interested in engaging the mediation of national affects can adopt. This includes paying attention to moments that do not appear to form significant “national events”. Taken together, I demonstrate how these different elements can teach us a substantial amount about the rise of global nationalism.
This article argues for a Decolonial Political Theology of vulnerability in the context of neo-apartheid South Africa. The article puts forward the argument that vulnerability is an essential part of the decolonial project, and in particular decolonial theology. In developing its argument, the article first provides some definitional limitations of vulnerability. It then links the definitions to the theme of the coloniality of Being and the discussion of the contents of decolonial vulnerability. What such apprehension of vulnerability underscores is a central assumption in the perspectives of vulnerability that focus on negative notions of vulnerability. In response, the article proposes that a decolonial political theology of vulnerability is one that should not simply aim to be yet another pedagogical practice of reading, writing, teaching, and learning differently. It should also endeavour to be oriented towards some form of justice aimed at restoring previously devalued epistemologies and ontologies.
International Relations is a discipline that takes itself seriously. What functions does this posture of seriousness serve? What is at stake in its maintenance and reproduction? And what ways of knowing, understanding, and performing politics are marginalized as a result? This article addresses these questions, drawing on feminist theory in order to show how the discipline’s performances of seriousness have served to exclude particular ways of being and knowing. While some feminists have responded to these exclusions by demanding to be taken seriously, we draw on queer theorists including Lauren Berlant, Jack Halberstam, and Cynthia Weber in order to suggest that IR might profitably benefit from the exploration of other critical and analytical registers. Engaging in what Berlant calls a “counterpolitics of the silly object,” we outline three sites of ontological, epistemological, and methodological intervention that emerge from a counterpolitical embrace of silliness.
Artykuł został poświęcony strategiom oporu w późnej nowoczesności, w szczególności zaś formom, które znajdują wyraz z literaturze pokolenia wchodzącego w dorosłość w okresie globalnego kryzysu finansowego (2008). Dwiema najważniejszymi strategianymi analizowanymi w artykule są sen i inne formy bierności, rozpoznawalne zarówno w twórczości millennialsów, jak i formach odmowy i oporu w przestrzeni pracy i polityki w ostatnich latach. Wśród inspiracji teoretycznych artykułu wymienić można Lauren Berlant i jej Cruel Optimism, prace Judith Butler na temat gromadzenia się w przestrzeni publicznej, a także inne opracowanie poruszające zagadnienia pasywności, oczekiwania i sprzeciwu. Celem artykułu jest rozważenie możliwości odwrócenia tradycyjnej hierarchii protestu i oporu i zastanowienie nad możliwym znaczeniem, jakie we współczesności może mieć odmowa gromadzenia się, sen czy, z drugiej strony, odmowa cierpliwości i oczekiwania.
The article surveys Lauren Berlant’s ideas concerning the emotional functioning of the human being in the context of neoliberal capitalism and argues for their limitation resulting from Berlant’s focus on the society-ideology axis while overlooking the significance of the early bonds in the development of one’s emotional regulation. Contrary to the multiple Marxist interpretations of culture, Berlant emphasizes that politics is effective by shaping human fantasies of desire rather than merely producing ideology. In the case of the United States this mechanism mainly refers to creating a collective hope for a “good life,” which is carried on within the paradigm of the Weberian protestant ethics: through hard work, perseverance and self-reliance, that is according to the myth of the American dream. Simultaneously, authors working within the field of developmental psychology demonstrate the key significance of human early attachments for the shaping of one’s self-trust and emotional balance, which enables a more critical attitude towards the cultural norms of happiness and makes it possible to find satisfaction not through responding to the fantasies generated by culture, but through relationships with other empirically existing human beings. The article thus maintains that works by psychologists such as Donald Woods Winnicott, John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth fill in a significant void in Berlant’s writings and give hope for an overcoming of the “cruel optimism” impasse.
In this article, I analyse the constitutive effects of the exclusion of sex work for the European Union’s (EU’s) lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersexual (LGBTI) policies. I combine queer theory, the literature on EU LGBTI politics and approaches that address sex work from a queer perspective and develop a discursive analysis of the EU’s LGBTI policies between 1984 and 2020. I argue that the EU’s LGBTI policies exclude sex work in various ways and that such exclusion is constitutive of the EU’s LGBTI policies themselves, in particular, when sex work is framed in neo-abolitionist terms. Specifically, the EU’s LGBTI policies exclude sex work as a constitutive other against which the neoliberal and homonormative sexual subject of rights and new sexual respectability that structures such policies are constructed. The exclusion of sex work from the EU’s LGBTI policies is thus indispensable to disciplining political subjectivity and sexuality in line with heteronormativity and neoliberalism in such terms.
This essay analyzes representations of (anti)romantic relationships and episodes of “forced intimacy” in Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees (2015) and Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s Stay with Me (2017). I will establish a parallelism between the intimate and romantic relationships described in the novels and the social and political evolution of the Nigerian nation, placing the focus onto the female protagonists and their obligation to conform to preestablished feminine and heterosexual models in agreement with Nigerian traditional practices. Through the analysis of the affective and sociocultural evolution of these women, I aim to prove that there is a direct association between demystified representations of the nation and a disillusionment with the romantic ideals of the couples featured in the novels. I will refer to their evolution as “postromantic” since it transcends the performativity linked to romanticization.
This thesis examines a sample of policy texts (speeches and texts) through a Critical Discourse Analysis underpinned by Bacchi's 'What is the Problem Represented to be' (WPR) approach to uncover the underlying problematisations that lie behind social security policy post-2010.
This chapter discusses the role that U.S.-based pro-family groups have played in mobilizing and coordinating campaigns against Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) in African countries. The U.S. abstinence-only movement is discussed, providing historical context to the contemporary Stop CSE campaign that gained momentum in several African countries in the late 2010s. In addition to their activities to create moral panic about sexuality education in Africa, the chapter examines the efforts of pro-family groups to grow a coalition against Comprehensive Sexuality Education at the United Nations. The anti-LGBTIQ+ underpinnings of the Stop CSE campaign are further considered as a strategy through which pro-family groups are mainstreaming intolerance towards queer and transgender people and communities.
Kobe Bryant’s career began at a time when NBA players were at a new level of stardom. As Michael Jordan’s career ended, Kobe was the next generational superstar to take over the NBA. As a rookie, and the Los Angeles Laker’s star player from a suburban Pennsylvania home, Kobe quickly became an acceptable Black icon that was easy to support. However, a 2003 rape allegation against him changed this trajectory. After the case was dropped, and Kobe issued an apology, the memory of this event followed him for the rest of his career and posthumously. My chapter investigates the way Kobe’s career took off, and how with help from Nike, he revived his image. This created confounding mourning process for Americans after his sudden death. Today, he is remembered almost exclusively as a benevolent “girl dad,” while any memory of his controversial career is greatly ignored.
James Redfield's novel The Celestine Prophecy spent over three years on the New York Times bestseller list and has become an influential work that promotes New Age ideologies to a broad readership. Although New Age spirituality was originally associated with countercultural politics, a structural analysis of The Celestine Prophecy reveals how Redfield mobilizes gendered and racialized tropes to reaffirm rather than challenge hegemonic American culture. An analysis of readers' online reviews finds that despite its lack of literary merit, the text resonates with individuals who feel dominated by powerful others including social institutions and domestic aggressors. Since New Age spirituality predominantly attracts white middle-class women, a close reading investigates what kind of future society The Celestine Prophecy proposes and whom it might serve.
What makes the work of the American experimental writer Kathy Acker so utterly relevant today, almost thirty years after her passing? The articles collected in this volume aim to provide answers to this question. Indeed, through studies of both Acker’s published and unpublished works, analyses of her writing process, and pieces blurring the boundaries between critical and creative writing, these articles map the writer’s body of works and weave webs the way the “Black Tarantula” would. Kathy Acker was part of a tradition of literary radicals and rebels of the 20th century avant-garde that flourished in the Counterculture and continued in the punk culture. Through acts of literary piracy and shock tactics, she unveiled and stood against techniques of domination and control. Indeed, she appropriated others’ texts, subverted genres and genders and thus challenged the rigidity of meaning and identity to allow them to fluctuate and flow. These texts confirm the central roles of both body and language in Acker’s works as spaces of friction between power and liberation and position the writer as a radical practitioner, a visionary.
In this special issue, we explore the geopolitics, aesthetics and future potentiality surrounding TikTok to assess the possibility and implications of a new phase of digital globalisation. A phase in which China-based innovative platform technologies, infused with state power, generate and potentially disrupt digital cultures in places outside China. We will further explore this in the next part of this introduction, showing how the global rise of TikTok is feeding into increasing geopolitical anxieties worldwide. At the same time, we argue for the need to diversify our approaches to TikTok and platform studies – the latter field is very much dominated by questions around production, monetisation, data and political economy. More approaches, focusing on aesthetics, visual culture and users, are needed. In the second part of this introduction, we mobilise the notion of repetitive creativities as a way to engage with the aesthetic affordances of TikTok. This brings us to our conclusion, in which we allude to the possibility that TikTok can be seen as a kind of silly archive, offering glimpses of a future that is not yet here, but that may well come.
The following paper proposes a reading of American poet Eileen Myles’ 2007 poetry collection Sorry, Tree in the interrelated contexts of Lauren Berlant’s understanding of intimacy and her concept of intimate citizenship, Lee Edelman’s understanding of sexuality and negativity, as well as Giorgio Agamben’s sense of the contemporary as always untimely. An openly lesbian and queer author, Myles gestures towards the sawed and the disempowered, olering an intimate, yet unmistakably political negotiation of a minoritarian lesbian position as both denant and transformative of the (hetero)normative status quo through acts of observation, engagement, and participation that do not necessarily have to be conspicuous or successful to elect reconceptualization of the social; rather, Myles suggests that individual agency in the public world also resides in failure as illuminative of the fact that one’s desire for presence is continuously actualized through entanglement with negativity.
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