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“turn into affect” please summary the introduction part.

Working with Affect in Feminist Readings
Affect has become something of a buzzword in cultural and feminist theory
during the past decade. References to affect, emotions and intensities abound;
their implications in terms of research practices have often remained less
manifest. Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences
explores the place and function of affect in feminist knowledge production in
general and in textual methodology in particular. With an international group
of contributors from studies of history, media, philosophy, culture, ethnology,
art, literature and religion, the volume investigates affect as the dynamics of
reading, as carnal encounters and as possibilities for the production of
knowledge. Working with Affect in Feminist Readings asks what exactly are
we doing when working with affect, and what kinds of ethical, epistemological
and ontological issues this involves. Not limiting itself to descriptive
accounts, the volume takes part in establishing new ways of understanding
feminist methodology.
Marianne Liljeström is Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of
Turku, Finland. Her research interests are in Russian/Soviet history, and in
feminist theory and methodology. Her most recent publications are Feminist
Knowing – Discussions on Methodology (editor, in Finnish, 2004) and Useful
Selves: RussianWomen’s Autobiographical Texts from the Post-War Period (2004).
Susanna Paasonen is a research fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for
Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki. With an interest in internet
research, studies of sexuality and popular media culture, she is the author of
Figures of Fantasy (Lang, 2005) and co-editor of Women and Everyday Uses
of the Internet (Lang, 2002) and Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media
Culture (Berg, 2007).
Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism
Edited by:
Maureen McNeil, Institute of Women’s Studies, Lancaster University
Lynne Pearce, Department of English, Lancaster University
Other books in the series include:
Transformations
Thinking through feminism
Edited by Sarah Ahmed, Jane Kilby,
Celia Lury, Maureen McNeil and
Beverley Skeggs
Thinking Through the Skin
Edited by Sara Ahmed and
Jackie Stacey
Strange Encounters
Embodied others in post-coloniality
Sara Ahmed
Feminism and Autobiography
Texts, theories, methods
Edited by Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury
and Penny Summerfield
Advertising and Consumer Citizenship
Gender, images and rights
Anne M. Cronin
Mothering the Self
Mothers, daughters, subjects
Stephanie Lawler
When Women Kill
Questions of agency and
subjectivity
Belinda Morrissey
Class, Self, Culture
Beverley Skeggs
Haunted Nations
The colonial dimensions of
multiculturalisms
Sneja Gunew
The Rhetorics of Feminism
Readings in contemporary cultural
theory and the popular press
Lynne Pearce
Women and the Irish Diaspora
Breda Gray
Jacques Lacan and Feminist
Epistemology
Kirsten Campbell
Judging the Image
Art, value, law
Alison Young
Sexing the Soldier
Rachel Woodward and
Trish Winter
Violent Femmes
Women as spies in popular culture
Rosie White
Pregnancy, Risk and Biopolitics
On the threshold of the living subject
Lorna Weir
Feminist Cultural Studies of
Science and Technology
Maureen McNeil
Arab, Muslim, Woman
Voice and vision in postcolonial
literature and film
Lindsey Moore
Secrecy and Silence in the
Research Process
Feminist reflections
Róisín Ryan-Flood and Rosalind Gill
Working with Affect in
Feminist Readings
Disturbing differences
Edited by Marianne Liljeström and
Susanna Paasonen
Feminism, Culture and
Embodied Practice
The rhetorics of comparison
Carolyn Pedwell
Sociability, Sexuality, Self
Relationality and individualization
Sasha Roseneil
Working with Affect in
Feminist Readings
Disturbing differences
Edited by
Marianne Liljeström and
Susanna Paasonen
First published 2010
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2010 Marianne Liljeström and Susanna Paasonen for selection and
editorial material
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Liljeström, Marianne.
Working with affect in feminist readings : disturbing differences /
Marianne Liljeström and Susanna Paasonen.
p. cm.
1. Affect (Psychology) 2. Feminism. I. Paasonen, Susanna, 1975- II. Title.
BF531.L528 2009
305.42–dc22
2009014980
ISBN13 978-0-415-48139-7 (hbk)
ISBN13 978-0-203-88592-5 (ebk)
ISBN10 0-415-48139-2 (hbk)
ISBN10 0-203-88592-9 (ebk)
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010.
To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.
ISBN 0-203-88592-9 Master e-book ISBN
Contents
Notes on contributors ix
Introduction: Feeling differences – affect and feminist reading 1
MARIANNE LILJESTRÖM AND SUSANNA PAASONEN
1 Anaffective turn? Reimagining the subject of feminist theory 8
ANU KOIVUNEN
PART I
Affective attachments 29
2 Creating disturbance: Feminism, happiness and affective
differences 31
SARA AHMED
3 A sense of play: Affect, emotion and embodiment in World of
Warcraft 45
JENNY SUNDÉN
4 Disturbing, fleshy texts: Close looking at pornography 58
SUSANNA PAASONEN
5 Expanding laughter: Affective viewing, body image incongruity
and Fat Actress 72
KATARIINA KYRÖLÄ
6 Daughters of privilege: Class, sexuality, affect and the
Gilmore Girls 85
LEENA-MAIJA ROSSI
PART II
Dynamics of difference 99
7 Differences disturbing identity: Deleuze and feminism 101
ELIZABETH GROSZ
8 Nomadic bodies, transformative spaces: Affective encounters
with Indian spirituality 112
JOHANNA AHONEN
9 Hips don’t lie? Affective and kinaesthetic dance ethnography 126
ANU LAUKKANEN
10 Ethics of empathy and reading in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus
Blooms at Night 140
ELINAVALOVIRTA
11 Beyond redemption? Mobilizing affect in feminist reading 151
LYNNE PEARCE
12 Crossing the east-west divide: Feminist affective dialogues 165
MARIANNE LILJESTRÖM
13 Working with affect in the corporate university 182
MELISSA GREGG
Index 193
viii Contents
Contributors
Sara Ahmed is Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College
and works at the intersection of feminist, queer and critical race studies.
Her books include Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism
(1998); Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality
(2000); The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) and Queer Phenomenology:
Orientations, Objects, Others (2006). Her next book The Promise of Happiness
is forthcoming with Duke University Press.
Johanna Ahonen is a PhD student of Finnish National Doctoral School of
Women’s Studies at the University of Turku and her doctoral thesis in
progress deals with gender, embodiment and sexuality in Indian-inspired
alternative spiritualities in Finland. Her research interests also include the
religious and the secular in the contemporary West, gender in Indian philosophy,
Tantric and Shakta traditions, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze
and Deleuzian feminism.
Melissa Gregg is a lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies,
University of Sydney, specialising in media, intimacy and work cultures.
She is author of Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices (Palgrave, 2006)
and co-editor, with Gregory J. Seigworth, of The Affect Theory Reader
(Duke University Press, forthcoming).
Elizabeth Grosz teaches in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at
Rutgers University, New Jersey. She has worked on feminist and French
philosophy, particularly on theories of the body and theories of space and
time. She is the author most recently of Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and
the Framing of the Earth (Columbia University Press, 2008).
Anu Koivunen is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at
Stockholm University and a member of the Finnish Centre of Excellence
in Political Thought and Conceptual Change (Academy of Finland), The
Politics of Philosophy and Gender Research Team 2006–11. She is the
author of Performative Histories, Foundational Framings. Gender and
Sexuality in Niskavuori Films (1938–1984) (Helsinki: Finnish Historical
Society, 2003), and currently conducting research on ‘Moving experiences:
Affective turns in Cinema and Media Studies’.
Katariina Kyrölä is a researcher in Media Studies, University of Turku, and
finalizing her PhD research on fat bodies in contemporary media, affect
and corporeal viewing. She has published several articles on the topic and
co-edited the first Finnish anthology on feminist politics of body size (Size
Matters! Helsinki: Like, 2007).
Anu Laukkanen is a PhD student of Folkloristics at the School of Cultural
Research, University of Turku. In her PhD thesis she explores what kind of
encounters between differentially positioned subjects are possible in the
field of belly dancing in Finland. Her main interests are intercultural performances,
feminist dance ethnography, and the role of emotions and the
body in the research process.
Marianne Liljeström is Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of
Turku, Finland. Her research interests are in Russian/Soviet history, and in
feminist theory and methodology. Her most recent publications are Feminist
Knowing – Discussions on Methodology (editor, in Finnish, 2004) and
Useful Selves: Russian Women’s Autobiographical Texts from the Post-War
Period (2004).
Susanna Paasonen is a research fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for
Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki. With an interest in internet
research, studies of sexuality and popular media culture, she is the author
of Figures of Fantasy (Lang, 2005) and co-editor of Women and Everyday
Uses of the Internet (Lang, 2002) and Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in
Media Culture (Berg, 2007).
Lynne Pearce is Chair of Literary Theory and Women’s Writing at Lancaster
University, UK. Her books include Woman/Image/Text: Readings in Pre-
Raphaelite Art and Literature (1991), Reading Dialogics (1994), Feminism
and the Politics of Reading (1997), The Rhetorics of Feminism (2004) and
Romance Writing (2007), as well as several edited collections focused on
issues of reception and epistemology. From 2006–9 she was director and
principal investigator of the AHRC-funded research project ‘Moving
Manchester: Mediating marginalities’.
Leena-Maija Rossi is Associate Professor of Gender Studies at the University
of Helsinki. Her research interests include performativity of gender and
sexuality, and intersections of different aspects of identity, especially in
representations of visual culture. She is the author of the books Art in
Power (1999, in Finnish) and Hetero Factory (2003, in Finnish).
Jenny Sundén is Assistant Professor at the Department of Media Technology,
Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. Her research interests
are primarily in new media studies, science and technology studies, queer/
feminist theory and games. She is the author of Material Virtualities:
Approaching Online Textual Embodiment (Lang, 2003), and co-editor of
Cyberfeminism in Northern Lights: Gender and Digital Media in a Nordic
x Contributors
Context (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007) and Second Nature: Origins
and Originality in Art, Science and New Media (forthcoming).
Elina Valovirta is finishing her doctoral thesis on feminist reader theory in
Anglophone Caribbean women’s writing at the Department of English,
University of Turku in Finland. Her published work is mainly on Caribbean
women’s writing. She recently co-edited the book Seeking the Self –
Encountering the Other. Diasporic Narrative and the Ethics of Representation
(Cambridge Scholars’ Publishing, 2008).
Contributors xi

Introduction
Feeling differences – affect and
feminist reading
Marianne Liljeström and
Susanna Paasonen
Affect has become a challenging epistemological question in feminist research
as its theorizations as intensities of feeling, emotional attachments and gut
reactions have multiplied within cultural theory during the past decade (e.g.
Pearce 1997; Lupton 1998). Affect has turned into a site for rethinking theoretical
concerns ranging from dualisms of the mind and the body to critiques
of identity politics and practices of critical reading. Drawing on the work of
thinkers as different as Baruch Spinoza or Silvan Tomkins, this rethinking has
emphasized the carnal ways of being in, experiencing and understanding the
world that are fundamentally relational and productive.
New materialist critiques in particular have argued for the shortcomings of
textual analysis and the legacy of the so-called textual turn for its tendency to
downplay the sensory and the material in accounts of society and culture
while conceptualizing cultural phenomena as discourses, texts or systems to
be interpreted (e.g. Massumi 2002). For many, the so-called ‘affective turn’ is
a reaction towards the limitations of post-structuralist theorizations, their
structuralist legacies and commitment to linguistic models. In contrast, considerations
of affect foreground questions of matter, biology and energetic
forces (Scott 2001; Braidotti 2002; Barad 2003; Clough and Halley 2007).
This critical debate has contributed to a return to the so-called ontological
question as connected to the pondering of difference(s) between identity
categories – or what today is often called the intersectional approach to feminist
knowledge production.
It can indeed be argued that there has been an overuse of textual metaphors
in cultural theory since the 1990s (as in the readings of bodies, landscapes
or artefacts as texts to be interpreted or ‘decoded’ without accounting
for their materiality): a broad range of intellectual concerns are bypassed or
even lost if focusing solely on the semantic and the symbolic. Nevertheless,
such critique risks conveying a rather limited, if not flat, understanding of
reading as a critical activity. Importantly, it may also block from view the
centrality of reading, interpretation and experience – and that of ethics – as
intellectual concerns within feminist research. Feminist literary scholars have
paid attention to the inseparability of affect and interpretation: rather than
readerly mastery, interpretation becomes a question of contagious affects and
dynamic encounters between texts and readers (Gallop 1988; Pearce 1997;
Armstrong 2000; Sedgwick 2003; Ngai 2005). Cinema and media studies
scholars, again, have elaborated on synaesthetic sensations, embodied experiences
and forceful impressions involved in screen-based media (Marks 2002;
Sobchack 2004), whereas scholars investigating the boundary work concerning
the spheres of the public and the private have theorized the role of affect
in marking individual and collective bodies apart from one another through
hierarchical notions of difference (Berlant 2000; Cvetkovich 2003; Ahmed
2004). In thinking through the notion of difference(s), the affective dimensions
of feminism itself have been increasingly taken under scrutiny (hooks
2000; Ahmed 2004; Ngai 2005; Probyn 2005).
In the wake of these debates, Working with Affect in Feminist Readings:
Disturbing Differences explores the place and role of affect in feminist
knowledge production in general and in textual methodology in particular.
With a focus on practices of reading (above all, in ethnography, interviews,
close reading, narrative and discourse analysis), the volume at hand investigates
the methodological possibilities of working with and through affect in
feminist research, asking what implications does working with affect have for
practices of reading. What kinds of considerations of scholarly agency,
accountability and ethics does it entail? And what kinds of knowledge does it
facilitate? Rather than to position considerations of materiality, affect and
embodiment in opposition to textual analysis, the book investigates their
interrelations as intimate co-dependence.
In the very first chapter of the volume, titled ‘An affective turn? Reimagining
the subject of feminist theory’, Anu Koivunen provides an analytical
overview of the different definitions of the ‘affective turn’ in relation to other
‘turns’ within feminist theorization (including linguistic, phenomenological
and ontological turns, turns to the body and the personal). Koivunen questions
the dramatic notion of ‘a turn’, contextualizes recent scholarly debates
on affect and ties them into the development and different paradigms of
feminist theory. Koivunen also investigates the connections and differences
between the concepts of affect, emotion, passion and feeling, as well as the
different intellectual traditions and concerns connected to them, hence providing
a framework for the discussions on the ‘affective turn’, as well as for
the essays in this particular volume.
Working with Affect in Feminist Readings is divided into two thematic
parts, titled ‘Affective Attachments’ and ‘Dynamics of Difference’, respectively.
While the themes, as well as those presented in the individual chapters,
do inevitably overlap, the sections offer slightly different approaches to affect
and feminist reading. The chapters in the first part, ‘Affective Attachments’,
are connected by their focus on issues of embodiment (in the sense of bodily
encounters, body images, avatars and sexually explicit imagery) as well as the
power of texts and images to move their viewers in highly bodily ways. The
authors ask what it means to be moved by and attached to the texts and
images we study, as well as the kinds of analytical possibilities this entails.
2 Liljeström and Paasonen
Sara Ahmed’s chapter, ‘Creating disturbance: Feminism, happiness and
affective differences’, focuses on what she titles ‘unhappy feminist archives’.
These take shape through the circulation of cultural objects that articulate an
unhappiness with happiness, objects that perhaps have already acquired an
affective value. Ahmed’s method is to explore how certain objects come to be
affective over time: how some bodies cause disturbance, or become the cause
of disturbance, because they refuse to participate in the happiness wish. She
emphasizes that to refuse the happiness wish involves an affective reorientation
– while you can cause disturbance, you can also turn disturbance into a
cause.
In ‘A sense of play: Affect, emotion, and embodiment in World of Warcraft’,
Jenny Sundén explores embodied experiences, affective investments and
circulations in the online role-playing game World of Warcraft by using the
methods of ethnography and close playing. She asks what this kind of enormously
popular game sets in motion as an aesthetic object and, more broadly,
as a media text, as well as the effects such ‘movement’ may have on the ways
of thinking and feeling. Sundén argues for an expansion of game studies by
asking queer questions concerning gender and sexuality, and by cherishing an
affective, passionate approach to games both theoretically and methodologically.
The theme of the affective force of texts continues in Susanna Paasonen’s
chapter, ‘Disturbing, fleshy texts: Close looking at pornography’. By
paying attention to the neglected complexity of affect and conflicting emotional
responses related to pornography, stepping away from the pleasure/
disgust binary embedded in feminist studies of porn and considering the
uncontrollable aspects of images, Paasonen experiments with close looking at
pornography that involves acknowledging the power of images and the effects
of being moved or touched by them. The chapter addresses a specific image
of a penis and a running shoe in an aim to shift attention from the meanings
of the image to the workings and affect of pornography.
In ‘Expanding laughter: Affective viewing, body image incongruity and Fat
Actress’, Katariina Kyrölä continues to think about sensory engagements with
media texts. With the purpose of mapping out the possibilities of laughter to
expand our views of ourselves and others, she analyses the television comedy
show Fat Actress (USA 2005) in relation to corporeal laughing spectatorship
and the critical possibilities of unruly feminist laughter. She shows, on the one
hand, how the concept of body image can be fruitful in analysing the corporeal
effects of images, and, on the other hand, how laughter can be
approached as an affective and power-entrenched relation between viewing
and imaged bodies. The section ends with Leena-Maija Rossi’s chapter,
‘Daughters of privilege: Class, sexuality, affect and the Gilmore Girls’, addressing
affective media relationships in the series Gilmore Girls (USA 2001–7).
Rossi reserves the notion of emotion to representations and the concept of
affect to the bodily effects of these representations. With an interest in reading
surprising and contradictory moments and critical undercurrents in the series,
she discusses three aspects in particular: parodic representation of gendered
Introduction 3
white upper-class privilege; jokes referring to non-normative sexuality and
awkward moments of same-sex closeness, and a complex stance towards
futurity.
The chapters in the second part, ‘Dynamics of Difference’, address the
concept of difference from diverse viewp01oints – as experiences of difference
within transnational feminism, hierarchical edifices of differences and difference
as incalculable force alike. The section opens with Elizabeth Grosz’s critical
discussion on the concepts of identity and intersectionality, titled
‘Differences disturbing identity: Deleuze and feminism’. Grosz expresses
concern towards the narrowing focus of feminist thinking caused by the vast
attention given to the narrational, the personal and the individual. According
to Grosz, this selective focus leaves out questions related to the rest of existence
as feminism abdicates the right to speak about the real, matter or forces
both social and material. In contrast, and grounded in Deleuzian feminist
theory, she addresses (pure) difference as the generative force that enacts
materiality itself, as the movement of difference that marks the very energies
of existence before and beyond identity.
In the following chapter, titled ‘Nomadic bodies, transformative spaces:
Affective encounters with Indian spirituality’, Johanna Ahonen considers the
spiritual Indian leader Amma and her embrace (darshan). By exploring the
phenomenon through the notion of affect as intensities between bodies and
utilizing her ethnographic fieldwork, Ahonen aims to deconstruct dualisms
such as spiritual/corporeal, transcendence/immanence or rational/mystical.
She does this by combining the Deleuzian feminist concept of becoming with
the Indian philosophical notion of shakti (feminine cosmic power). The
chapter shows how these concepts facilitate considerations of transformative
energy and create a potential source for new feminist theorizations of ontology.
While Ahonen is concerned with the theorization of spiritual experiences
as dynamic forces difficult to grasp through more conventional research
methodology, Anu Laukkanen brings together the methods of kinaesthetic
empathy and affective reading in her exploration into the possibilities of
bodily, affective knowledge in dance ethnography. Her chapter, ‘Hips don’t
lie? Affective and kinaesthetic dance ethnography’, investigates the conflicting
and ambivalent emotional paths of so-called Egyptian feeling and the Egyptian
styles of Oriental dance. ‘Egyptian feeling’ works as a conceptual, cultural
and bodily intersection through which Laukkanen considers the
ambivalent nature of getting moved by dance and the histories of bodies
experiencing dance.
In the chapter ‘Ethics of empathy and reading in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus
Blooms at Night’, Elina Valovirta brings together the idea of the Caribbean
queer with the affective and ethical ‘turns’ in feminism. More specifically,
Valovirta focuses on the role of reading in relation to the ethics of empathy at
play in the novel. She examines how an extraordinary text-reader bond
emerges because of the refusal of the text’s vocabulary to explicitly name
certain sexual identities, and shows how the affective process of ‘withness’ (a
4 Liljeström and Paasonen
concept introduced by Sara Ahmed) becomes a way to conceptualize ‘queerness’
in the relationship between the protagonists and in the subsequent textreader
relationship. Continuing further with the method of close reading,
Lynne Pearce asks the intriguing question as to why we should wish to write
or read a story that does not move its characters, and us as readers, forward
in some way or give us any reward in the end. Questioning the urge of constant
forward-looking, her chapter, ‘Beyond redemption? Mobilizing affect in
feminist reading’, addresses two novels by migrate women writers about
‘minor emotions’, about hopelessness and disappointment, stories that do not
go anywhere. Methodologically, Pearce emphasizes the necessity of making
conscious, ‘always already’ political, interpretative choices in our affective
readings.
The last chapter in this section is Marianne Liljeström’s ‘Crossing the eastwest
divide: Feminist affective dialogues’, which moves to thinking about
geopolitical differences. Liljeström engages critically with integrationist feminist
aspirations by reading the work of the Ukranian feminist Irina Zherebkina
and her applications of Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity to the
construction of current post-Soviet gender discourse. Her contextual affective
reading emphasizes both interlinked historical experiences and discursive
networks across borders, yet underlines that the awareness of such links and
care for enhanced transnational feminist communication does not absolve one
from the potentiality of failed understanding.
The book ends with Melissa Gregg’s chapter ‘Working with affect in the
corporate university’. Gregg examines the concept of affective labour and
research traditions concerning it, and extends these considerations to the
conditions of the contemporary workplace. By drawing parallels to studies of
fandom and participatory culture, which underline the importance of scholars
recognizing their own involvement and investment in the cultures of consumption
they study, she addresses transformations in the white-collar workplace
and, more specifically, their consequences for scholarship in the context
of the corporate university where academics are presumed to strongly invest
in the workplace as a source of identity. Gregg suggests that academics should
cease to understand their own work lives as exceptional and that they must
acknowledge their own forms of ‘working with affect’ in order to provide
more comprehensive studies of the production cultures of knowledge work.
As this overview makes evident, Working with Affect in Feminist Readings
takes a broad approach to both studies of affect and practices of reading.
Rather than attaching itself to any singular theoretical framework, paradigm
or definition concerning the ‘affective turn’ (e.g. Clough and Halley 2007), the
volume asks for what ends this turn has been envisioned and defined, as well
as the kinds of implications theorizations of affect have for feminist research
in general, and for textual methods in particular. Methodologically, the individual
chapters draw on forms of textual analysis: research material varies
from novels and scholarly books to online role-playing games, fieldwork
notes, television series, pornographic images and, centrally, the researchers’
Introduction 5
affective encounters with, and diverse attachments to, the texts in question.
The authors work with ethnographic methods (Ahonen; Gregg; Laukkanen;
Sundén), representational analysis (Rossi), close reading (Ahmed; Kyrölä;
Liljeström; Pearce; Valovirta), as well as variations of close playing (Sundén)
and close looking (Paasonen).
As Koivunen points out in her chapter, the affective and ethical ‘turns’ in
feminism are closely linked together in both their temporal proximity and
their central concerns. In fact, the question of affect and feminist reading
surfaces centrally as one of ethics and answerability. By approaching affect
and analysis as intimately interconnected, this book underlines the role of the
embodied and the sensory in and for acts of interpretation – the kinds of
orientations, attachments and aversions that encounters with texts may give
rise to, and the kinds of readings they facilitate.
Acknowledgement
This book builds on the research project (2004–7) and conference (2007) titled
‘Disturbing differences: Feminist readings of identity, location and power’.
The project was funded by the Academy of Finland and directed by Marianne
Liljeström at the Centre for Women’s Studies, University of Turku.
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Introduction 7
1 Anaffective turn?
Reimagining the subject of feminist theory
Anu Koivunen
Feminist theory, Teresa de Lauretis has argued, came ‘into its own’ through a
self-conscious and self-critical redefinition of its key terms – subject, power
and difference. In her account, it was ‘the feminist critique of feminism’ by
women of colour and lesbians since the turn of the 1980s that made feminist
theory possible and identifiable as feminist theory ‘rather than a feminist critique
of some other theory or object-theory’ (de Lauretis 1990: 131). As a
result of this critique, she maintained, the subject of feminism was reconceptualized
as ‘shifting and multiply organized across variable axes of difference’,
and social field redefined as ‘a tangle of distinct and variable relations of
power and points of resistance’. These redefinitions were a result of feminist
critique becoming conscious of itself, turning inwards and examining its own
terms. In 1990, therefore, amid intensifying identity politics around issues of
sexuality, ethnicity and ‘race’, de Lauretis proposed a notion of feminist
theory, in the singular, as a ‘process of understanding’ and a ‘pursuit of consciousness’
(de Lauretis 1990: 116, 131). Mapping a historical legacy of
‘social and subjective transformation’ within feminist theory, de Lauretis
linked together the 1970s’ practice of consciousness-raising, Adrienne Rich’s
call for the ‘politics of location’, and ‘the theory in the flesh’ or ‘mestizaconsciousness’
proposed by Cherrié Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. Within
such a frame, de Lauretis envisioned both the subject of feminism and the
practice of feminist theory in terms of movement and self-displacement that is
‘concurrently social and subjective, internal and external, indeed political and
personal’ (de Lauretis 1990: 116).
While firmly rooted in poststructuralist notions of language and subjectivity,
and foregrounding consciousness as a key term, the way in which de
Lauretis characterizes the movement of feminist thought seems, in hindsight,
to foresee the broad interest in the question of affect feminist scholarship
would take from the 1990s onwards. In the fields of philosophy, history, literature,
cinema studies, art history, media and cultural studies as well as in
sociology, anthropology, politics and science studies, feminist scholars have
turned to the question of affect and the topic of affectivity in search of a new
critical vocabulary for investigating and conceptualizing the subject of feminism
as embodied, located and relational. This search has been highly visible
in the abundance of publications, conferences and course syllabi that across
the humanities and social sciences have established the ‘affective life’ – affects,
emotions, feelings, passions, moods and sentiments – as a new research area
(Greco and Stenner 2008).
Beyond a mere ‘hot topic’ (Woodward 1996), however, what has been
termed ‘an affective turn’ (e.g. Koivunen 2001; Gibbs 2002; Clough and
Halley 2007, 2008; Gorton 2008; Tyler 2008) is best viewed as a broad range
of criticisms of the linguistic turn and its effects on feminist research. Importantly,
it will be argued, a turn to affect can be detected both against and
within the poststructuralist, social constructionist theories of subject and
power. Affects have become an object of interest both as articulations of culture,
language and ideology, and as a force field that questions scholarly
investments in those terms. Furthermore, the ‘turn’ features both an individualist
and anti-individualist thread. While the question of affect for many
scholars is a question of epistemology and methodology and, therefore, an
opportunity for increased personal and political accountability through ‘a lost
language of emotion’ (Middleton 1992) or a rehabilitation of ‘the emotional
self ’ (Lupton 1998), for others it reads as a possibility to move beyond the
individual and personal, and to relocate critical attention from language, discourse
and representations to the real, from body to matter, from cultures to
nature, from identity to difference, from psychic to social. Whereas some view
the concept of affect as a means to focus on the agency of the subject, others
use it to displace the concept of subject and to radically rephrase the notion
of agency itself. Whatever the focus, the affective turn is fuelled by a desire to
renegotiate the critical currency of feminist thought. For some, the turn
entails refining and complementing constructionist models and reworking the
relations of the subjective and the social. For others, the turn is about new
disciplinary alliances, most notably across the divide between human and
natural sciences.
To talk about an affective turn in the singular is to imply a shared agenda
and sense of direction that does not do justice to the diversified field of feminists
‘working with affect’. This becomes all the more evident when focusing
on the concept of affect, trying to locate the identity of the turn in a conceptual
novelty, a shift from emotion or feeling to affect – a concept that
beyond psychology or psychoanalysis, or as a term connoting physiological
processes, was hardly used in the social sciences or humanities until the 1990s.
In one contemporary reading, ‘emotion refers to cultural and social
expression, whereas affects are of biological and physiological nature’ (Probyn
2005: 11). Such conceptual division can be seen to reflect disciplinary preferences:
the humanities and social sciences, those studying cognition, social
expression and interpretation of cultures traditionally use ‘emotion’, whereas
the sciences, those studying the brain and the body, privilege ‘affect’ as a term
(Probyn 2005: xv). There is, however, little agreement on these definitions.
In Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the notion of affect is vague, referring
to necessary states of pain and pleasure, to unmeasurable and inner-directed
An affective turn? 9

Order Description

“turn into affect” please summary the introduction part.

Working with Affect in Feminist Readings
Affect has become something of a buzzword in cultural and feminist theory
during the past decade. References to affect, emotions and intensities abound;
their implications in terms of research practices have often remained less
manifest. Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences
explores the place and function of affect in feminist knowledge production in
general and in textual methodology in particular. With an international group
of contributors from studies of history, media, philosophy, culture, ethnology,
art, literature and religion, the volume investigates affect as the dynamics of
reading, as carnal encounters and as possibilities for the production of
knowledge. Working with Affect in Feminist Readings asks what exactly are
we doing when working with affect, and what kinds of ethical, epistemological
and ontological issues this involves. Not limiting itself to descriptive
accounts, the volume takes part in establishing new ways of understanding
feminist methodology.
Marianne Liljeström is Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of
Turku, Finland. Her research interests are in Russian/Soviet history, and in
feminist theory and methodology. Her most recent publications are Feminist
Knowing – Discussions on Methodology (editor, in Finnish, 2004) and Useful
Selves: RussianWomen’s Autobiographical Texts from the Post-War Period (2004).
Susanna Paasonen is a research fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for
Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki. With an interest in internet
research, studies of sexuality and popular media culture, she is the author of
Figures of Fantasy (Lang, 2005) and co-editor of Women and Everyday Uses
of the Internet (Lang, 2002) and Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media
Culture (Berg, 2007).
Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism
Edited by:
Maureen McNeil, Institute of Women’s Studies, Lancaster University
Lynne Pearce, Department of English, Lancaster University
Other books in the series include:
Transformations
Thinking through feminism
Edited by Sarah Ahmed, Jane Kilby,
Celia Lury, Maureen McNeil and
Beverley Skeggs
Thinking Through the Skin
Edited by Sara Ahmed and
Jackie Stacey
Strange Encounters
Embodied others in post-coloniality
Sara Ahmed
Feminism and Autobiography
Texts, theories, methods
Edited by Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury
and Penny Summerfield
Advertising and Consumer Citizenship
Gender, images and rights
Anne M. Cronin
Mothering the Self
Mothers, daughters, subjects
Stephanie Lawler
When Women Kill
Questions of agency and
subjectivity
Belinda Morrissey
Class, Self, Culture
Beverley Skeggs
Haunted Nations
The colonial dimensions of
multiculturalisms
Sneja Gunew
The Rhetorics of Feminism
Readings in contemporary cultural
theory and the popular press
Lynne Pearce
Women and the Irish Diaspora
Breda Gray
Jacques Lacan and Feminist
Epistemology
Kirsten Campbell
Judging the Image
Art, value, law
Alison Young
Sexing the Soldier
Rachel Woodward and
Trish Winter
Violent Femmes
Women as spies in popular culture
Rosie White
Pregnancy, Risk and Biopolitics
On the threshold of the living subject
Lorna Weir
Feminist Cultural Studies of
Science and Technology
Maureen McNeil
Arab, Muslim, Woman
Voice and vision in postcolonial
literature and film
Lindsey Moore
Secrecy and Silence in the
Research Process
Feminist reflections
Róisín Ryan-Flood and Rosalind Gill
Working with Affect in
Feminist Readings
Disturbing differences
Edited by Marianne Liljeström and
Susanna Paasonen
Feminism, Culture and
Embodied Practice
The rhetorics of comparison
Carolyn Pedwell
Sociability, Sexuality, Self
Relationality and individualization
Sasha Roseneil
Working with Affect in
Feminist Readings
Disturbing differences
Edited by
Marianne Liljeström and
Susanna Paasonen
First published 2010
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2010 Marianne Liljeström and Susanna Paasonen for selection and
editorial material
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Liljeström, Marianne.
Working with affect in feminist readings : disturbing differences /
Marianne Liljeström and Susanna Paasonen.
p. cm.
1. Affect (Psychology) 2. Feminism. I. Paasonen, Susanna, 1975- II. Title.
BF531.L528 2009
305.42–dc22
2009014980
ISBN13 978-0-415-48139-7 (hbk)
ISBN13 978-0-203-88592-5 (ebk)
ISBN10 0-415-48139-2 (hbk)
ISBN10 0-203-88592-9 (ebk)
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010.
To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.
ISBN 0-203-88592-9 Master e-book ISBN
Contents
Notes on contributors ix
Introduction: Feeling differences – affect and feminist reading 1
MARIANNE LILJESTRÖM AND SUSANNA PAASONEN
1 Anaffective turn? Reimagining the subject of feminist theory 8
ANU KOIVUNEN
PART I
Affective attachments 29
2 Creating disturbance: Feminism, happiness and affective
differences 31
SARA AHMED
3 A sense of play: Affect, emotion and embodiment in World of
Warcraft 45
JENNY SUNDÉN
4 Disturbing, fleshy texts: Close looking at pornography 58
SUSANNA PAASONEN
5 Expanding laughter: Affective viewing, body image incongruity
and Fat Actress 72
KATARIINA KYRÖLÄ
6 Daughters of privilege: Class, sexuality, affect and the
Gilmore Girls 85
LEENA-MAIJA ROSSI
PART II
Dynamics of difference 99
7 Differences disturbing identity: Deleuze and feminism 101
ELIZABETH GROSZ
8 Nomadic bodies, transformative spaces: Affective encounters
with Indian spirituality 112
JOHANNA AHONEN
9 Hips don’t lie? Affective and kinaesthetic dance ethnography 126
ANU LAUKKANEN
10 Ethics of empathy and reading in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus
Blooms at Night 140
ELINAVALOVIRTA
11 Beyond redemption? Mobilizing affect in feminist reading 151
LYNNE PEARCE
12 Crossing the east-west divide: Feminist affective dialogues 165
MARIANNE LILJESTRÖM
13 Working with affect in the corporate university 182
MELISSA GREGG
Index 193
viii Contents
Contributors
Sara Ahmed is Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College
and works at the intersection of feminist, queer and critical race studies.
Her books include Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism
(1998); Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality
(2000); The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) and Queer Phenomenology:
Orientations, Objects, Others (2006). Her next book The Promise of Happiness
is forthcoming with Duke University Press.
Johanna Ahonen is a PhD student of Finnish National Doctoral School of
Women’s Studies at the University of Turku and her doctoral thesis in
progress deals with gender, embodiment and sexuality in Indian-inspired
alternative spiritualities in Finland. Her research interests also include the
religious and the secular in the contemporary West, gender in Indian philosophy,
Tantric and Shakta traditions, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze
and Deleuzian feminism.
Melissa Gregg is a lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies,
University of Sydney, specialising in media, intimacy and work cultures.
She is author of Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices (Palgrave, 2006)
and co-editor, with Gregory J. Seigworth, of The Affect Theory Reader
(Duke University Press, forthcoming).
Elizabeth Grosz teaches in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at
Rutgers University, New Jersey. She has worked on feminist and French
philosophy, particularly on theories of the body and theories of space and
time. She is the author most recently of Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and
the Framing of the Earth (Columbia University Press, 2008).
Anu Koivunen is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at
Stockholm University and a member of the Finnish Centre of Excellence
in Political Thought and Conceptual Change (Academy of Finland), The
Politics of Philosophy and Gender Research Team 2006–11. She is the
author of Performative Histories, Foundational Framings. Gender and
Sexuality in Niskavuori Films (1938–1984) (Helsinki: Finnish Historical
Society, 2003), and currently conducting research on ‘Moving experiences:
Affective turns in Cinema and Media Studies’.
Katariina Kyrölä is a researcher in Media Studies, University of Turku, and
finalizing her PhD research on fat bodies in contemporary media, affect
and corporeal viewing. She has published several articles on the topic and
co-edited the first Finnish anthology on feminist politics of body size (Size
Matters! Helsinki: Like, 2007).
Anu Laukkanen is a PhD student of Folkloristics at the School of Cultural
Research, University of Turku. In her PhD thesis she explores what kind of
encounters between differentially positioned subjects are possible in the
field of belly dancing in Finland. Her main interests are intercultural performances,
feminist dance ethnography, and the role of emotions and the
body in the research process.
Marianne Liljeström is Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of
Turku, Finland. Her research interests are in Russian/Soviet history, and in
feminist theory and methodology. Her most recent publications are Feminist
Knowing – Discussions on Methodology (editor, in Finnish, 2004) and
Useful Selves: Russian Women’s Autobiographical Texts from the Post-War
Period (2004).
Susanna Paasonen is a research fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for
Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki. With an interest in internet
research, studies of sexuality and popular media culture, she is the author
of Figures of Fantasy (Lang, 2005) and co-editor of Women and Everyday
Uses of the Internet (Lang, 2002) and Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in
Media Culture (Berg, 2007).
Lynne Pearce is Chair of Literary Theory and Women’s Writing at Lancaster
University, UK. Her books include Woman/Image/Text: Readings in Pre-
Raphaelite Art and Literature (1991), Reading Dialogics (1994), Feminism
and the Politics of Reading (1997), The Rhetorics of Feminism (2004) and
Romance Writing (2007), as well as several edited collections focused on
issues of reception and epistemology. From 2006–9 she was director and
principal investigator of the AHRC-funded research project ‘Moving
Manchester: Mediating marginalities’.
Leena-Maija Rossi is Associate Professor of Gender Studies at the University
of Helsinki. Her research interests include performativity of gender and
sexuality, and intersections of different aspects of identity, especially in
representations of visual culture. She is the author of the books Art in
Power (1999, in Finnish) and Hetero Factory (2003, in Finnish).
Jenny Sundén is Assistant Professor at the Department of Media Technology,
Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. Her research interests
are primarily in new media studies, science and technology studies, queer/
feminist theory and games. She is the author of Material Virtualities:
Approaching Online Textual Embodiment (Lang, 2003), and co-editor of
Cyberfeminism in Northern Lights: Gender and Digital Media in a Nordic
x Contributors
Context (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007) and Second Nature: Origins
and Originality in Art, Science and New Media (forthcoming).
Elina Valovirta is finishing her doctoral thesis on feminist reader theory in
Anglophone Caribbean women’s writing at the Department of English,
University of Turku in Finland. Her published work is mainly on Caribbean
women’s writing. She recently co-edited the book Seeking the Self –
Encountering the Other. Diasporic Narrative and the Ethics of Representation
(Cambridge Scholars’ Publishing, 2008).
Contributors xi

Introduction
Feeling differences – affect and
feminist reading
Marianne Liljeström and
Susanna Paasonen
Affect has become a challenging epistemological question in feminist research
as its theorizations as intensities of feeling, emotional attachments and gut
reactions have multiplied within cultural theory during the past decade (e.g.
Pearce 1997; Lupton 1998). Affect has turned into a site for rethinking theoretical
concerns ranging from dualisms of the mind and the body to critiques
of identity politics and practices of critical reading. Drawing on the work of
thinkers as different as Baruch Spinoza or Silvan Tomkins, this rethinking has
emphasized the carnal ways of being in, experiencing and understanding the
world that are fundamentally relational and productive.
New materialist critiques in particular have argued for the shortcomings of
textual analysis and the legacy of the so-called textual turn for its tendency to
downplay the sensory and the material in accounts of society and culture
while conceptualizing cultural phenomena as discourses, texts or systems to
be interpreted (e.g. Massumi 2002). For many, the so-called ‘affective turn’ is
a reaction towards the limitations of post-structuralist theorizations, their
structuralist legacies and commitment to linguistic models. In contrast, considerations
of affect foreground questions of matter, biology and energetic
forces (Scott 2001; Braidotti 2002; Barad 2003; Clough and Halley 2007).
This critical debate has contributed to a return to the so-called ontological
question as connected to the pondering of difference(s) between identity
categories – or what today is often called the intersectional approach to feminist
knowledge production.
It can indeed be argued that there has been an overuse of textual metaphors
in cultural theory since the 1990s (as in the readings of bodies, landscapes
or artefacts as texts to be interpreted or ‘decoded’ without accounting
for their materiality): a broad range of intellectual concerns are bypassed or
even lost if focusing solely on the semantic and the symbolic. Nevertheless,
such critique risks conveying a rather limited, if not flat, understanding of
reading as a critical activity. Importantly, it may also block from view the
centrality of reading, interpretation and experience – and that of ethics – as
intellectual concerns within feminist research. Feminist literary scholars have
paid attention to the inseparability of affect and interpretation: rather than
readerly mastery, interpretation becomes a question of contagious affects and
dynamic encounters between texts and readers (Gallop 1988; Pearce 1997;
Armstrong 2000; Sedgwick 2003; Ngai 2005). Cinema and media studies
scholars, again, have elaborated on synaesthetic sensations, embodied experiences
and forceful impressions involved in screen-based media (Marks 2002;
Sobchack 2004), whereas scholars investigating the boundary work concerning
the spheres of the public and the private have theorized the role of affect
in marking individual and collective bodies apart from one another through
hierarchical notions of difference (Berlant 2000; Cvetkovich 2003; Ahmed
2004). In thinking through the notion of difference(s), the affective dimensions
of feminism itself have been increasingly taken under scrutiny (hooks
2000; Ahmed 2004; Ngai 2005; Probyn 2005).
In the wake of these debates, Working with Affect in Feminist Readings:
Disturbing Differences explores the place and role of affect in feminist
knowledge production in general and in textual methodology in particular.
With a focus on practices of reading (above all, in ethnography, interviews,
close reading, narrative and discourse analysis), the volume at hand investigates
the methodological possibilities of working with and through affect in
feminist research, asking what implications does working with affect have for
practices of reading. What kinds of considerations of scholarly agency,
accountability and ethics does it entail? And what kinds of knowledge does it
facilitate? Rather than to position considerations of materiality, affect and
embodiment in opposition to textual analysis, the book investigates their
interrelations as intimate co-dependence.
In the very first chapter of the volume, titled ‘An affective turn? Reimagining
the subject of feminist theory’, Anu Koivunen provides an analytical
overview of the different definitions of the ‘affective turn’ in relation to other
‘turns’ within feminist theorization (including linguistic, phenomenological
and ontological turns, turns to the body and the personal). Koivunen questions
the dramatic notion of ‘a turn’, contextualizes recent scholarly debates
on affect and ties them into the development and different paradigms of
feminist theory. Koivunen also investigates the connections and differences
between the concepts of affect, emotion, passion and feeling, as well as the
different intellectual traditions and concerns connected to them, hence providing
a framework for the discussions on the ‘affective turn’, as well as for
the essays in this particular volume.
Working with Affect in Feminist Readings is divided into two thematic
parts, titled ‘Affective Attachments’ and ‘Dynamics of Difference’, respectively.
While the themes, as well as those presented in the individual chapters,
do inevitably overlap, the sections offer slightly different approaches to affect
and feminist reading. The chapters in the first part, ‘Affective Attachments’,
are connected by their focus on issues of embodiment (in the sense of bodily
encounters, body images, avatars and sexually explicit imagery) as well as the
power of texts and images to move their viewers in highly bodily ways. The
authors ask what it means to be moved by and attached to the texts and
images we study, as well as the kinds of analytical possibilities this entails.
2 Liljeström and Paasonen
Sara Ahmed’s chapter, ‘Creating disturbance: Feminism, happiness and
affective differences’, focuses on what she titles ‘unhappy feminist archives’.
These take shape through the circulation of cultural objects that articulate an
unhappiness with happiness, objects that perhaps have already acquired an
affective value. Ahmed’s method is to explore how certain objects come to be
affective over time: how some bodies cause disturbance, or become the cause
of disturbance, because they refuse to participate in the happiness wish. She
emphasizes that to refuse the happiness wish involves an affective reorientation
– while you can cause disturbance, you can also turn disturbance into a
cause.
In ‘A sense of play: Affect, emotion, and embodiment in World of Warcraft’,
Jenny Sundén explores embodied experiences, affective investments and
circulations in the online role-playing game World of Warcraft by using the
methods of ethnography and close playing. She asks what this kind of enormously
popular game sets in motion as an aesthetic object and, more broadly,
as a media text, as well as the effects such ‘movement’ may have on the ways
of thinking and feeling. Sundén argues for an expansion of game studies by
asking queer questions concerning gender and sexuality, and by cherishing an
affective, passionate approach to games both theoretically and methodologically.
The theme of the affective force of texts continues in Susanna Paasonen’s
chapter, ‘Disturbing, fleshy texts: Close looking at pornography’. By
paying attention to the neglected complexity of affect and conflicting emotional
responses related to pornography, stepping away from the pleasure/
disgust binary embedded in feminist studies of porn and considering the
uncontrollable aspects of images, Paasonen experiments with close looking at
pornography that involves acknowledging the power of images and the effects
of being moved or touched by them. The chapter addresses a specific image
of a penis and a running shoe in an aim to shift attention from the meanings
of the image to the workings and affect of pornography.
In ‘Expanding laughter: Affective viewing, body image incongruity and Fat
Actress’, Katariina Kyrölä continues to think about sensory engagements with
media texts. With the purpose of mapping out the possibilities of laughter to
expand our views of ourselves and others, she analyses the television comedy
show Fat Actress (USA 2005) in relation to corporeal laughing spectatorship
and the critical possibilities of unruly feminist laughter. She shows, on the one
hand, how the concept of body image can be fruitful in analysing the corporeal
effects of images, and, on the other hand, how laughter can be
approached as an affective and power-entrenched relation between viewing
and imaged bodies. The section ends with Leena-Maija Rossi’s chapter,
‘Daughters of privilege: Class, sexuality, affect and the Gilmore Girls’, addressing
affective media relationships in the series Gilmore Girls (USA 2001–7).
Rossi reserves the notion of emotion to representations and the concept of
affect to the bodily effects of these representations. With an interest in reading
surprising and contradictory moments and critical undercurrents in the series,
she discusses three aspects in particular: parodic representation of gendered
Introduction 3
white upper-class privilege; jokes referring to non-normative sexuality and
awkward moments of same-sex closeness, and a complex stance towards
futurity.
The chapters in the second part, ‘Dynamics of Difference’, address the
concept of difference from diverse viewpoints – as experiences of difference
within transnational feminism, hierarchical edifices of differences and difference
as incalculable force alike. The section opens with Elizabeth Grosz’s critical
discussion on the concepts of identity and intersectionality, titled
‘Differences disturbing identity: Deleuze and feminism’. Grosz expresses
concern towards the narrowing focus of feminist thinking caused by the vast
attention given to the narrational, the personal and the individual. According
to Grosz, this selective focus leaves out questions related to the rest of existence
as feminism abdicates the right to speak about the real, matter or forces
both social and material. In contrast, and grounded in Deleuzian feminist
theory, she addresses (pure) difference as the generative force that enacts
materiality itself, as the movement of difference that marks the very energies
of existence before and beyond identity.
In the following chapter, titled ‘Nomadic bodies, transformative spaces:
Affective encounters with Indian spirituality’, Johanna Ahonen considers the
spiritual Indian leader Amma and her embrace (darshan). By exploring the
phenomenon through the notion of affect as intensities between bodies and
utilizing her ethnographic fieldwork, Ahonen aims to deconstruct dualisms
such as spiritual/corporeal, transcendence/immanence or rational/mystical.
She does this by combining the Deleuzian feminist concept of becoming with
the Indian philosophical notion of shakti (feminine cosmic power). The
chapter shows how these concepts facilitate considerations of transformative
energy and create a potential source for new feminist theorizations of ontology.
While Ahonen is concerned with the theorization of spiritual experiences
as dynamic forces difficult to grasp through more conventional research
methodology, Anu Laukkanen brings together the methods of kinaesthetic
empathy and affective reading in her exploration into the possibilities of
bodily, affective knowledge in dance ethnography. Her chapter, ‘Hips don’t
lie? Affective and kinaesthetic dance ethnography’, investigates the conflicting
and ambivalent emotional paths of so-called Egyptian feeling and the Egyptian
styles of Oriental dance. ‘Egyptian feeling’ works as a conceptual, cultural
and bodily intersection through which Laukkanen considers the
ambivalent nature of getting moved by dance and the histories of bodies
experiencing dance.
In the chapter ‘Ethics of empathy and reading in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus
Blooms at Night’, Elina Valovirta brings together the idea of the Caribbean
queer with the affective and ethical ‘turns’ in feminism. More specifically,
Valovirta focuses on the role of reading in relation to the ethics of empathy at
play in the novel. She examines how an extraordinary text-reader bond
emerges because of the refusal of the text’s vocabulary to explicitly name
certain sexual identities, and shows how the affective process of ‘withness’ (a
4 Liljeström and Paasonen
concept introduced by Sara Ahmed) becomes a way to conceptualize ‘queerness’
in the relationship between the protagonists and in the subsequent textreader
relationship. Continuing further with the method of close reading,
Lynne Pearce asks the intriguing question as to why we should wish to write
or read a story that does not move its characters, and us as readers, forward
in some way or give us any reward in the end. Questioning the urge of constant
forward-looking, her chapter, ‘Beyond redemption? Mobilizing affect in
feminist reading’, addresses two novels by migrate women writers about
‘minor emotions’, about hopelessness and disappointment, stories that do not
go anywhere. Methodologically, Pearce emphasizes the necessity of making
conscious, ‘always already’ political, interpretative choices in our affective
readings.
The last chapter in this section is Marianne Liljeström’s ‘Crossing the eastwest
divide: Feminist affective dialogues’, which moves to thinking about
geopolitical differences. Liljeström engages critically with integrationist feminist
aspirations by reading the work of the Ukranian feminist Irina Zherebkina
and her applications of Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity to the
construction of current post-Soviet gender discourse. Her contextual affective
reading emphasizes both interlinked historical experiences and discursive
networks across borders, yet underlines that the awareness of such links and
care for enhanced transnational feminist communication does not absolve one
from the potentiality of failed understanding.
The book ends with Melissa Gregg’s chapter ‘Working with affect in the
corporate university’. Gregg examines the concept of affective labour and
research traditions concerning it, and extends these considerations to the
conditions of the contemporary workplace. By drawing parallels to studies of
fandom and participatory culture, which underline the importance of scholars
recognizing their own involvement and investment in the cultures of consumption
they study, she addresses transformations in the white-collar workplace
and, more specifically, their consequences for scholarship in the context
of the corporate university where academics are presumed to strongly invest
in the workplace as a source of identity. Gregg suggests that academics should
cease to understand their own work lives as exceptional and that they must
acknowledge their own forms of ‘working with affect’ in order to provide
more comprehensive studies of the production cultures of knowledge work.
As this overview makes evident, Working with Affect in Feminist Readings
takes a broad approach to both studies of affect and practices of reading.
Rather than attaching itself to any singular theoretical framework, paradigm
or definition concerning the ‘affective turn’ (e.g. Clough and Halley 2007), the
volume asks for what ends this turn has been envisioned and defined, as well
as the kinds of implications theorizations of affect have for feminist research
in general, and for textual methods in particular. Methodologically, the individual
chapters draw on forms of textual analysis: research material varies
from novels and scholarly books to online role-playing games, fieldwork
notes, television series, pornographic images and, centrally, the researchers’
Introduction 5
affective encounters with, and diverse attachments to, the texts in question.
The authors work with ethnographic methods (Ahonen; Gregg; Laukkanen;
Sundén), representational analysis (Rossi), close reading (Ahmed; Kyrölä;
Liljeström; Pearce; Valovirta), as well as variations of close playing (Sundén)
and close looking (Paasonen).
As Koivunen points out in her chapter, the affective and ethical ‘turns’ in
feminism are closely linked together in both their temporal proximity and
their central concerns. In fact, the question of affect and feminist reading
surfaces centrally as one of ethics and answerability. By approaching affect
and analysis as intimately interconnected, this book underlines the role of the
embodied and the sensory in and for acts of interpretation – the kinds of
orientations, attachments and aversions that encounters with texts may give
rise to, and the kinds of readings they facilitate.
Acknowledgement
This book builds on the research project (2004–7) and conference (2007) titled
‘Disturbing differences: Feminist readings of identity, location and power’.
The project was funded by the Academy of Finland and directed by Marianne
Liljeström at the Centre for Women’s Studies, University of Turku.
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Introduction 7
1 Anaffective turn?
Reimagining the subject of feminist theory
Anu Koivunen
Feminist theory, Teresa de Lauretis has argued, came ‘into its own’ through a
self-conscious and self-critical redefinition of its key terms – subject, power
and difference. In her account, it was ‘the feminist critique of feminism’ by
women of colour and lesbians since the turn of the 1980s that made feminist
theory possible and identifiable as feminist theory ‘rather than a feminist critique
of some other theory or object-theory’ (de Lauretis 1990: 131). As a
result of this critique, she maintained, the subject of feminism was reconceptualized
as ‘shifting and multiply organized across variable axes of difference’,
and social field redefined as ‘a tangle of distinct and variable relations of
power and points of resistance’. These redefinitions were a result of feminist
critique becoming conscious of itself, turning inwards and examining its own
terms. In 1990, therefore, amid intensifying identity politics around issues of
sexuality, ethnicity and ‘race’, de Lauretis proposed a notion of feminist
theory, in the singular, as a ‘process of understanding’ and a ‘pursuit of consciousness’
(de Lauretis 1990: 116, 131). Mapping a historical legacy of
‘social and subjective transformation’ within feminist theory, de Lauretis
linked together the 1970s’ practice of consciousness-raising, Adrienne Rich’s
call for the ‘politics of location’, and ‘the theory in the flesh’ or ‘mestizaconsciousness’
proposed by Cherrié Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. Within
such a frame, de Lauretis envisioned both the subject of feminism and the
practice of feminist theory in terms of movement and self-displacement that is
‘concurrently social and subjective, internal and external, indeed political and
personal’ (de Lauretis 1990: 116).
While firmly rooted in poststructuralist notions of language and subjectivity,
and foregrounding consciousness as a key term, the way in which de
Lauretis characterizes the movement of feminist thought seems, in hindsight,
to foresee the broad interest in the question of affect feminist scholarship
would take from the 1990s onwards. In the fields of philosophy, history, literature,
cinema studies, art history, media and cultural studies as well as in
sociology, anthropology, politics and science studies, feminist scholars have
turned to the question of affect and the topic of affectivity in search of a new
critical vocabulary for investigating and conceptualizing the subject of feminism
as embodied, located and relational. This search has been highly visible
in the abundance of publications, conferences and course syllabi that across
the humanities and social sciences have established the ‘affective life’ – affects,
emotions, feelings, passions, moods and sentiments – as a new research area
(Greco and Stenner 2008).
Beyond a mere ‘hot topic’ (Woodward 1996), however, what has been
termed ‘an affective turn’ (e.g. Koivunen 2001; Gibbs 2002; Clough and
Halley 2007, 2008; Gorton 2008; Tyler 2008) is best viewed as a broad range
of criticisms of the linguistic turn and its effects on feminist research. Importantly,
it will be argued, a turn to affect can be detected both against and
within the poststructuralist, social constructionist theories of subject and
power. Affects have become an object of interest both as articulations of culture,
language and ideology, and as a force field that questions scholarly
investments in those terms. Furthermore, the ‘turn’ features both an individualist
and anti-individualist thread. While the question of affect for many
scholars is a question of epistemology and methodology and, therefore, an
opportunity for increased personal and political accountability through ‘a lost
language of emotion’ (Middleton 1992) or a rehabilitation of ‘the emotional
self ’ (Lupton 1998), for others it reads as a possibility to move beyond the
individual and personal, and to relocate critical attention from language, discourse
and representations to the real, from body to matter, from cultures to
nature, from identity to difference, from psychic to social. Whereas some view
the concept of affect as a means to focus on the agency of the subject, others
use it to displace the concept of subject and to radically rephrase the notion
of agency itself. Whatever the focus, the affective turn is fuelled by a desire to
renegotiate the critical currency of feminist thought. For some, the turn
entails refining and complementing constructionist models and reworking the
relations of the subjective and the social. For others, the turn is about new
disciplinary alliances, most notably across the divide between human and
natural sciences.
To talk about an affective turn in the singular is to imply a shared agenda
and sense of direction that does not do justice to the diversified field of feminists
‘working with affect’. This becomes all the more evident when focusing
on the concept of affect, trying to locate the identity of the turn in a conceptual
novelty, a shift from emotion or feeling to affect – a concept that
beyond psychology or psychoanalysis, or as a term connoting physiological
processes, was hardly used in the social sciences or humanities until the 1990s.
In one contemporary reading, ‘emotion refers to cultural and social
expression, whereas affects are of biological and physiological nature’ (Probyn
2005: 11). Such conceptual division can be seen to reflect disciplinary preferences:
the humanities and social sciences, those studying cognition, social
expression and interpretation of cultures traditionally use ‘emotion’, whereas
the sciences, those studying the brain and the body, privilege ‘affect’ as a term
(Probyn 2005: xv). There is, however, little agreement on these definitions.
In Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the notion of affect is vague, referring
to necessary states of pain and pleasure, to unmeasurable and inner-directed
An affective turn? 9