21 April 2023

Professor Valerie Hey

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/education/cheer

Post-post-structuralism? The Sensual(ist) Turn or Thinking Affects

Aims of the Session

To acknowledge the role of emotions in feminist politics and

ideas To explore the feminist remaking of the discipline of sociology To situate and describe further intellectual trends & resources

comprising ‘the affective turn’To describe research framed by a psycho-social opticTo site the Academy as affect-bearing and distributing To invite comments on some implications

21 April 2023

21 April 2023

Feminism’s politics and embodied experience is more than a ‘turn’

The politicisation of ‘experience’ involved action and theory-making

The production of a new language of analysis

The jouissance and ‘ugly feelings’ of women’s liberation

Identities and difference

Feminists In the Academy : ‘The war of conceptual attrition’

Sociology’s grammar focussed on the public sphere, the

world of paid labour, took gender & the ‘family’ as

normative. Atheoretical ‘naturalistic’ version of bodies

emotions, feelings.

Knowledge wars or ‘The dirty history of feminism and sociology: or the war of conceptual attrition’ (Skeggs, 2008)

21 April 2023

A Sociology without Feeling: : A Poststructuralism without Passion?

Sociology is neither sensual nor about the sensate:

‘...sociology is conspicuously inadequate …Physicality, humanity,

imagination, the other, fear, the limits of control: all are missing in their

own terms, in their own dynamic...[in order to produce insights which

are] ‘imaginative, sensual even, in that they speak to experience, which

includes the senses rather than simply cognition’

(Barrett, M. 2000).

Discursive ‘determinism’ ? or is there (theoretical) life beyond Foucault?

21 April 2023

CCCS: Representing feminism

Hall talks of the reconstruction enacted by feminism as : ‘ a thief in the night, it broke in, interrupted, made an

unseemly noise, seized the time, crapped on the table of cultural studies’ (Hall, 1992:282)

The Emergence of the Psychosocial as an Optic

21 April 2023

Explosion of wider academic interest in identity as ‘a becoming’ implicating feelings, emotion and affect = plural vocabularies express different disciplines conceptual vocabulary

Inter-disciplinary work across Psychology and Sociology - now entangled + neuroscience

Cultural Studies encompassed the aesthetic and embodied aspects of life - feelings, emotions, affects – the conscious and unconscious – desire, investments

Unstable Objects: Emotion or Affects?

Wetherell’s account of affect & emotion includes the way emotion

is understood in psychology as a grammar for describing singular

bodily states (fear, shame, pride, etc.) as well as the affective

covering a ‘wilder more encompassing project highlighting

difference, process and force’ (2012, 2).

Probyn, in contrast, splits the difference in the opposite way :

‘A basic distinction is that emotion refers to cultural and social

expression, whereas affects are of a biological and physiological

nature’ (2005: 11).

21 April 2023

The virtue of hospitality to different theories

21 April 2023

Clarke’s recent helpful review of ‘psycho-analytic sociology’ (2006) advocates that we

recognise, in the complex legacy of work on emotions, an effort in the best work to try

and hold onto rather than eliminate the tensions between the biological, the interactional,

social constructionism and psycho-analysis rather than adopt a prematurely inflexible

and unhelpful position—one that defines ‘the field of emotions’ with certainty. This

requires a deference and respect to the different provenance of ideas which in their

nature bring ambiguity and fragility in their wake. (Leathwood & Hey 2009 p 431).

It’s OK to be confused!

Any social theory worthy of its ambition

requires a space for enigmatic, chaotic,

incoherent, and structurally contradictory

attachments; it needs a way to assess the

attachment needs that put people in relation

without promising to deliver “a life” that

feels cushioned. There is no cure for

ambivalence.

(Lauren Berlant, 2011, Cultural

Anthropology; 26 (4)

21 April 2023

Feminist psycho-social approaches

Feminists Un/do the Masters !

21 April 2023

Feminism After Bourdieu

Feminist Bourdieusian approaches : Reay,(2005); Skeggs,(1997) – the concept

of habitus enhanced by a recognition of how class/classification ‘feels’ and how

gender works as affective processes.

‘the habitus - embodied habitus, internalised as second nature and so

forgotten as history – is the active presence of the whole past of which it

is the product.’

(Bourdieu, 1992:56).

21 April 2023

Class Interests & Motivated unconsciousness

‘The affective entailed in “interest” in collective/group

constructions of boundaries and affinities based

on the logic of interested calculation which works at the level

of the unconscious……how both affect is

used and produced by institutions and how it simmers in every

evaluation that is made of people’

(Skeggs, 2002).

21 April 2023

Emotion as a way of apprehending the world’ (Ahmed, 2004)

‘Emotions do things, and they align individuals with communities or bodily

space with social space through the very intensity of their attachments.

Rather than seeing emotions as psychological dispositions, we need to

consider how they work, in concrete and particular ways, to mediate the

relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual

and the collective. (Ahmed 2004a, 119) emphasis added

21 April 2023

Feminism After Freud

Walkerdine, Lucey & Melody’s (2001) take on class desires and

investments – messy subjectivity not heroic but all too human

‘[part of] the development of a form of theory of the subject which

did not accept the notion of ‘false consciousness’ but recognised, a

desiring consciousness expressing the lures and contradictions of

the social, since ‘everything is social’

(Hey, 2011)

21 April 2023

Butler In/Against Freud

Butler’s deconstructive epistemology – ‘troubling gender’ via the

vocabulary of subjectification, performativity, intelligibility – re/citation

yet humanist thread in her ontology of the subject:

‘Moreover this situation of primary dependency conditions the

political formation and regulation of subjects ...The one who holds

out the promise of continued existence plays to the desire to

survive.’

(Butler, 1997,7 cited in Hey & Leathwood, 2009)

21 April 2023

Construing a ‘psychosocial logic of enquiry’

A post-structural study exploring how unremarkable difference is made to matter in

the emotion-laden practices and processes of friendship – thus the structural power

of class, race, gender & heterosexuality takes cultural force and form.

(Hey, 1997) The Company She Keeps: an ethnography of girls’ friendship.

Turning the gaze back on the maker of knowledge – to ask who is the ‘I’ we bring

into being when we represent ‘the Other’ ?

(Hey, 2009) The Girl in the Mirror; the Psychic Economy of Class in Girlhood

Studies : an Interdisciplinary Journal (2009).

21 April 2023

Difficult and Dissident Theory

‘I want to suggest that it is possible to read ‘difficulty’ as an

important ethical component of the radical democratic project

within which Butler continues to situate her work … Butler is well

aware that her texts are labour intensive, but I hope it will become

clear that this labour potentially effects the making of politically

dissident readers […] who are prompted to question the limitations of

their ‘linguistic horizons’ along with the exclusionary schemes of

intelligibility which currently pass for the ontological norm.

(Salih, 2003, p. 43; emphasis added cited in Hey, 2006, p443)

21 April 2023

The Affective Economy of the Academy

The calculus of rational actor theory The dominance given to naïve realist views aligned with neo-

liberal realism (Wendy Brown)The toxic politics of narcissistic individualism

Yet :The truth of human and system vulnerability & interdependencyNot entirely captured by the system Bodily rebellions ?Mental qualms – the certainty of uncertainty

21 April 2023

Feminist Critique is Captured?

Feminists Are Undone by the Masters !

21 April 2023

Feminism, Fashion and Difference

Some questions: Has feminist theory moved from the realm of the necessity of

resistance into reproduction? Are there any political consequences for feminism of material

generational differences among ‘vintage’ feminists and younger

feminists? What new imaginaries can assist us in thinking outside the

‘master’ discourses and the ‘discourse of the master’?

21 April 2023

Resources for further reading

• Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,

• 2004. 224 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 0–7486–1847–3, £16.99

• Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and

• Citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. 308 pp. (incl. index).

• ISBN 0–8223–1924–1, £17.50

• Lauren Berlant, ed., Intimacy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. 455 pp.

• (incl. index). ISBN 0–226–38443–8, £16.00

• Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca, NY: University of Cornell Press,

• 2004. 227 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 0–8014–8862–1, £12.95

• Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public

• Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. 355 pp. (incl. index).

• ISBN 0–8223–3088–1, £18.50

• Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 422 pp.

• (incl. index). ISBN 0–674–01536–3, £19.95; paperback edition, 2007,

• ISBN 0–674–02409–5, £10.95

21 April 2023

Resources for further reading

• Elspeth Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

• 2005. 197 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 0–8166–2721–5, £14.00

• Denise Riley, Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect. Durham, NC: Duke University

• Press, 2005. 142 pp. ISBN 0–8223–3512–3, £12.95

• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham,

• NC: Duke University Press, 2003. 195 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 0–8223–3015, £15.50

• Elspeth Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

• 2005. 197 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 0–8166–2721–5, £14.00

• Denise Riley, Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect. Durham, NC: Duke University

• Press, 2005. 142 pp. ISBN 0–8223–3512–3, £12.95

• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham,

• NC: Duke University Press, 2003. 195 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 0–8223–3015, £15.50

• Margaret Wetherell (2012) Affect and Emotion : A New Social Science Understanding , London,

Sage

21 April 2023