CSWG Annual Lecture with Jennifer C. Nash and Samantha Pinto
Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, Warwick
Abstract
"What are, what does it mean, and how does it feel to inhabit the affective scripts of feminism today? We will attempt to chart the routines of feeling that make meaning, purpose, and direction for feminism in uncomfortable, often thwarted ways. In this talk, we look at articulations of rage, guilt, shame, depression, and exhaustion in feminist studies, in order to examine what has become, we’ve argued, feminism’s good object and methodology of this era: intersectionality. In looking at the affectual and material dimensions of the dominant modes of critiquing and curing white feminism-- shame and its sisters, guilt and depression-- we hope to think through the limits and the possibilities of bad objecthood and bad feelings in feminist thought and institutional praxis around its seemingly “good” object of intersectionality and the rage it imagines necessary as a disciplining force for the field and practice of feminism. Paying careful attention to the uses, usefulness, and limits of these registers in the feminist political imagination, we trace intersectional feminist scholarly, art, and media discernments of these affects while also theorizing emergent affects like exhaustion that append to the political formation & futures of feminism. In doing so, we hope both to make transparent the critical desires of feminist politics predicated on the narration of affective lives and to argue for renewed attention to the complex emotional registers of institutional life & feminism’s vulnerable and yet sustaining labor around it. We ultimately hope to consider under-studied modes of political feeling and thinking that Black feminism has highlighted to explore what these seemingly negative or minor affects look like when applied to intersectionality and feminism as objects and methods of study."