POLITICAL EMOTIONS: A NEW AGENDAS CONFERENCE
Friday and Saturday, October 3-4, 2008
9:00am-5:00pm
University of Texas at Austin
Lady Bird Johnson Room, CMA 5.160 (campus map/room map)
Free and open to the public
SPEAKERS & PAPERS
Keynote Speaker: Lauren Berlant
After the good life, the impasse: Human Resources, Time Out, and the Precarious Present
"After the Good Life" reads with two films of Laurent Cantet [Ressources humaines/Human Resources (1999) and L'Emploi du Temps/Time Out (2001)] to engage the new affective languages of the contemporary economic atmosphere: languages of anxiety, contingency, and precarity that take up the space where optimism, upward mobility, and meritocracy used to be. It is an inquiry into the affective conditions of the experience of contemporary life seen through the filmic mediation of bodies circulating in social space; it argues for thinking about the present as an impasse no longer legitimated by alibis of the future, but by pressures of survival in a durational now.
What happens to optimism when futurity splinters as a prop for getting through life? What happens when an older ambivalence about security (the Weberian prison of disenchanted labor) meets a newer ambivalence about it (it gets in the way of profit)? How to understand the emergence of this as a felt crisis across all class positions, from the poor to the wealthy? This emergent new realism stages the end of one era of social obligation and belonging by focusing, on what happens to manner and manners.
Samuel Baker
The Transmission of Gothic: Philosophy, Feeling, and the Media of Udolpho
Whether or not we approve of the gothic, identify with it, construe it narrowly or broadly, or think that it matters, we tend to tell similar stories about it. In these stories, the gothic is a private, and privatizing, artistic mode in which intimate communities conjure fantasies affecting enough to seize the political initiative from discourses borne of public deliberation. These fantasies seem to garner their affective power by manipulating individual emotional identification. But what if we were to conceive of emotional individuation not as a given element of the human condition, with which the gothic grapples, but rather as a habit inculcated by some (but not all) gothic forms? In that case, the true, hidden plot of the gothic might actually resemble the story of modern life—hardly a story at all, but rather a description—that this paper locates in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, a gothic novel that has been paradigmatic for its machinery of terror, but that has not been (but should be) paradigmatic for its media theory, for its conception of the transpersonal character of affect, and for its understanding of modernity as in the first instance the normalization of a contingent set of practices of desire.
Deborah Gould
Affecting the Political: An Assessment of the 'Emotional Turn' in the Study of Social Movement
Up until the 1970s, social scientific studies of mass politics were dominated by a literature on "crowds" that disparaged protesters as irrational--evident in their emotionality--and painted protest as more akin to acting out than acting on legitimate political grievances. Partially in response, the new field of social movement studies that emerged in the 1970s adopted the rational actor models then migrating from economics departments into other social science disciplines like sociology and political science. Because they too equated emotionality with irrationality, these scholars tended to write emotion out of movements; social movement participants instead were construed as cost-benefit calculating, strategic actors. That is the terrain on which the emotional turn in the field of social movements has occurred (beginning in the late 1990s), offering a corrective to these excessively rationalist paradigms but in a manner that tries to steer clear of the disparagements of protest that permeated the earlier crowd literature. My paper discusses that history and proposes that anxiety about the irrational--due to this history--haunts this emotional turn and has led scholars to adopt an overly cognitive rendering of emotion that downplays the more affective, bodily, visceral, unruly, indeterminate aspects of political emotion. I lay out what I see as the value of attending to those more affective dimensions of political emotion.
Gayatri Gopinath
Queer Regions: Re-Visioning Space and Sexuality in Transnational Times
This essay explores the possibilities of a comparative queer studies project that is situated at the intersection of queer studies, area studies, and diaspora studies. The notion of the region becomes a way of troubling the boundaries and presumptions of each of these three bodies of knowledge and offers a particularly productive spatial metaphor to map sexual topographies in this transnational moment. I argue that the region functions as a heuristic device that allows us to see the “queer” of queer studies, the “diaspora” of diaspora studies, and the “area” of area studies in novel and unexpected ways. More specifically, this essay explores how contemporary queer South Asian diasporic artists are turning to the region and mobilizing a diaspora-region axis, to articulate new modes of sexual subjectivity and to rework an affective relation to both the nation and to the transnational. In their mapping of a diaspora-region axis, these artists displace the primacy of the nation as the inevitable locus of diasporic address, longing, and return. I ask what new forms of affect and belonging are enabled and engendered by this turn to the region and argue that these queer diasporic evocations of the region challenge the reification of the categories of both “South Asian” and “queer” in critical ways.
Neville Hoad
How to have 'political feeling' in a Pandemic
In 1990, as far as it can be known, the HIV/AIDS infection rate in South Africa was around 1%, about the same as it was in Thailand and a little more than that of the United States. A mere 12 years later, in 2002, the South African infection rate hovered in the mid 20th percentile. Hidden in those numbers are deep and ongoing histories of governmentality and sovereignty, stories of emergent and now dominant sciences of demography, epidemiology, the hegemony of the modern state and the glimpses of its shifting role under neoliberalism – I cannot yet say demise. Those histories and analytics, while crucial, are not the focus of this paper, instead, I wish to fumble my way towards a category of, more pointedly, a phenomenology of what could be called political feeling, while remembering that every experience of the pandemic is both irreducibly singular and somehow shareable. In understanding the pandemic, attention to representations of experience that consider questions of the aesthetic, when it is broached at all, is presented as something like a luxury. I will engage two recent South African memoirs – Edwin Cameron’s Witness to AIDS, and Adam Levin’s Aidsafari – both published in 2005, and joint winners of the Sunday Times literary awards of 2005 – in order to see how these memoirs can move beyond the singularities promised by the genre of memoir, through ideas of the testimonial –so central to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission – to broach the political in the register of affect.
Liza Johnson
Return: Some Thoughts Related to a Film in Progress
This paper is associatively related to my narrative feature film in progress, Return, a story of a woman who returns to her deindustrialized Ohio hometown after she has been away for a year fighting in the war. Working alongside the visual, temporal, and kinesthetic concerns of that project, this essay considers field observations and anecdotes I’ve accumulated while researching the screenplay. I look at Claire Beckett’s photographs of female soldiers in what she calls “the pre-math of war,” as well as Katy Grannan’s aftermath images for the New York Times of female soldiers with PTSD. I also consider aspects of the history of post-Vietnam films about male soldiers coming home. What are the affective conditions of the postindustrial world to which the contemporary female soldier returns, and how might her post-traumatic affects resonate or collide with those conditions? How does the gendered expression of female soldiers’ post-traumatic affects shift familiar tropes of masculine return? What forms of seeing and modes of comportment might these affects generate? This essay is an effort to ask these questions while negotiating the materially real subjects of field work, the truth claims of realism, and the speculative and aesthetic projections of a fictional world.
Heather Love
Hooks, Pegs, and Candy Floss: Personal Identity in 1963
This paper is drawn from my new book project (“The Stigma Archive”) and is based on my research on the source materials for Erving Goffman’s sociological classic, Stigma: On the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963). Stigma mines a remarkable archive of texts: mid-century studies in sociology and psychology, popular memoirs and biographies, case histories, and novels. His method in the book is relentlessly comparative and synthetic: he outlines abstract concepts, and then points to his examples, in most cases a miscellaneous collection of texts by and about social others: for Jews, see X; for Negroes, see Y; for the blind, see Z. Not only does Stigma offer an overlooked archive for scholars in disability, queer, and critical race studies, it also constitutes an object lesson for thinking through the possibilities and challenges of comparative and intersectional work in the present. In this essay, I will focus on Goffman’s concept of personal identity, which he defines as consisting of two ideas—“positive marks or identity pegs, and the unique combination of life history items that comes to be attached to the individual with the help of these pegs for his identity.” He describes personal history as a chain of events that becomes entangled and sticks to identity marks like candy floss. I will frame this striking account in relation to contemporary theories of identity and I will describe the different kinds of “stickiness” experienced by returning to his source texts. I will argue that work on the politics of emotion can benefit both from Goffman’s primary method of abstract synthesis and from attention to the embodied, affective experience of social others archived in his footnotes.
Martin Manalansan
At Your “Serbis”: Queering Care Work In The Global Era
This presentation is a meditation on the idea of affect and labor in relation to sexuality, race and globality. Utilizing two films on Filipino labor, the first is “Paper Dolls,” a documentary on Filipino gay and transgender “care workers” in Israel, and “Serbis,” a recently Cannes Film Festival screened and acclaimed movie on sex workers in the Philippines, I explore the shifting terrain of emotional labor by reading it against notions of “disaffection,” “authenticity,” and “routine.” One of the pivotal questions I pose is how the practices and experiences of these two disparate group of workers converge in terms of bodily and emotional performance. I suggest an alternative framework that proposes that feelings are products of both detachment and filiation – to work against the normalizing tendencies to read feelings as attached to normative arrangements of family and workplace.
Roberto Tejada
Tongue Tied, Death Defiant, Wonderstruck: Passing for Politics in Mexico City
In the final decade of last century---in a convergence of local initiatives, and with the participation of exiles and expatriates from Europe, United States and Latin America---Mexico City was positioned on the forefront of global art practices. A complexity of factors in Mexico’s capital--- a radical urban laboratory---gave way to alternate currents and subcultures that formed legitimate arenas of their own, but in a dialogue with the official cultural apparatus. To examine these spaces is to explore the complex patterns and links that were mobilized between makers, nascent institutions, the information media, and the public---a challenge to standard principles of cultural production and means of circulation. I offer links that connect the political effects of privatization in Mexico during this time to a line of sensual or emotional inquiry concerning the public sphere, with examples that hurdle from the early twentieth century to image environments produced in the last two decades years.
Sasha Torres
Televising Guantánamo
Torture, as currently practiced by American military and intelligence personnel, is calibrated to produce emotional anguish as well as physical pain. In particular, the use of noise, light and extreme temperature to disrupt sleep; dogs to produce fear; and isolation to breakdown personality more generally all play roles in the contemporary torture regime as important, if not more important, as stress positions and waterboarding. My paper will examine the extent to which these affective dimensions of torture have registered in the American collective imagination by investigating the representation of the US interrogation camp at Guantánamo Bay on fictional US network television; the camp has been depicted on episodes of Threat Matrix, NCIS, JAG, Law and Order: Criminal Intent, Criminal Minds, Boston Legal, and E-Ring. What is the status, in American discourse about its own torture practices, of emotional pain? In its investigation of this question, "Televising Guantánamo" will depart from the bulk of academic writing about Guantánamo, which has focused on the legal and philosophical dimensions of states of exception and indefinite detention.
Amy Villarejo
The Birth of Reality Television and the Death of An American Family
Moving from the first sustained queer appearance on American television (Lance Loud, in 1973's An American Family, a twelve-hour observational documentary that aired on PBS) to that program's final episode (chronicling Lance's death in 2001), this paper seeks to explore the rhetoric and affect associated with queer becoming (coming out, adolescence, and familial relations in particular) in the generic transformation of the category "documentary" into the production mode called "reality television." Exploring this interval of roughly thirty years, this presentation seeks to understand the evolution of a stuttering, emotionally dense, elongated, passionate, and aesthetic enunciation of sexual life (Lance Loud in episode 2 of An American Family) into a starkly-drawn, pathos-laden, post-AIDS version of queer reality that circulates beyond the Louds into neoliberal codings of the family on television in its global industrial formation. What does it mean, in short, to come out on television?
Michele White
Privates and Publics: Gay Underwear Sellers, Reborn Doll Producers, and the Emotive Display of Bodies on eBay
Reborn doll producers and gay underwear sellers constitute and present bodies and intense emotions in the eBay setting. Their practices suggest that the binary articulation of public and private and the purported relationship between emotions, the body, and the private sphere need to be retheorized. Reborn doll producers, who are mostly women, paint upon, dress, prop, and photograph dolls in order to make them look like children and provide narratives about their love and intense care for these “forever babies.” Some male sellers self-present in revealing clothing, engage viewers, identify themselves and listings as “gay,” and work to avoid being regulated by eBay. In crafting presentations, these seemingly different sellers assert the importance of their identities, bring personal sentiments and behaviors into a highly visible setting, highlight male and doll bodies—specifically genitals, and undermine their claims to power and normativity. While reborn doll producers appear to have a much more socially approved position than underwear sellers who highlight their visible penis lines, their indications that reborning makes dolls real, renderings of scratched and bumpy baby skin, and narratives about intensely mothering dolls results in them being culturally dismissed. Examining these sellers’ practices and the blogs and other commentary about them also indicates how intimacy is performed—available male bodies and the love of dolls are ecommerce and affinity building strategies.
