Through a reading of Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother (1998), this article assesses claims for the empathetic potential of reading fiction, as a means of promoting cross-racial understanding. Drawing on feminist theorists Ann Cvetkovich, Clare Hemmings, and Sara Ahmed, I uncover the modes of political critique that can reside in resisting affective identification, and position Magona’s rejection of empathetic cross-racial connection as a critique of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). I focus particularly on Magona’s representation of black (...) motherhood, and argue that Mother to Mother seeks to inscribe the systematic violation of the maternal relation under apartheid – a form of violence that was not registered by the TRC – and also to position the black mother’s affective experience outside of the empathetic reach of the white mother, precisely because it is embedded in a long history of social, political, and material dispossession. (shrink)

Breastmilk is bought, sold, and donated in a global marketplace, which risks exploiting the women who produce it. In Detroit, black mothers are targeted as paid milk donors; milk from Cambodian and Indian mothers is sold to parents in the United States and Australia; and the International Breast Milk Project sends donated milk from the United States to Africa. Drawing on transnational care work and affect theory, I argue that merely refraining from paying women does not eliminate potentially harmful effects. (...) Addressing the ethical implications of these exchanges requires reconsidering the relationship between gift and commodity and between love and work. (shrink)

Whose personal is more political? This article explores the role of experience in contemporary feminist politics, arguing that it operates as a form of capital within abstracted and decontextualised debates which entrench existing power relations. In a neoliberal context in which the personal and emotional is commodified, powerful groups mobilise traumatic narratives to gain political advantage. Through case study analysis this article shows how privileged feminists, speaking for others and sometimes for themselves, use experience to generate emotion and justify particular (...) agendas, silencing critics who are often from more marginalised social positions. The use of the experiential as capital both reflects and perpetuates the neoliberal invisibilisation of structural dynamics: it situates all experiences as equal, and in the process fortifies existing inequalities. This competitive discursive field is polarising, and creates selective empathies through which we tend to discredit others’ realities instead of engaging with their politics. However, I am not arguing for a renunciation of the politics of experience: instead, I ask that we resist its commodification and respect varied narratives while situating them in a structural frame. (shrink)

This article draws from the work of scholars in Critical Whiteness Studies to provide a nuanced analysis of ‘white shame’ in anti-racist education. In particular, it is argued that antiracist politics and pedagogy can be enriched by recognizing the affective and political complexities emerging from white shame and shaming. The purpose is to suggest that white shame has different manifestations depending on context and subject/group, and that those manifestations are related to feelings about white privilege, white ignorance, white fragility, and (...) white complicity. The author uses examples of white shame to discuss the pedagogical principles that inform the development of strategies for anti-racist education, emphasizing how educators can capitalize on teachable racial moments in the classroom that: move beyond white students’ tendency to default to shame; and, move beyond white students’ affective investments to racial inequality, while critically equipping white students to explore responsible ways of inhabiting their whiteness. (shrink)

Interrogating the oft-stated emotion of ‘guilt’ amongst young female activists, I develop a theoretical account of why young women seem to be more burdened with such negative emotions than young men. Drawing on feminist theorising, I posit that young women’s emotional accounts of activist work highlight the retraditionalisation of gender under neoliberal modernity. I provide evidence of the gender-differentiated demands that heightened forms of reflexivity place on women, young women in particular. I then consider alternative conceptions of politics, grounded in (...) the work of Hannah Arendt, and extending my own earlier work on relational agency (Kennelly, 2009). Drawing on phenomenology to offer an account of political engagement grounded in the lived experiences of activists, I suggest that social movements might be bolstered through a deepened understanding of the role played by webs of relations and world-building practices, without losing sight of the gendered implications of such a turn. (shrink)

Maternal health has become a top global priority. In contrast to the decline of the maternal subject (Stephens, 2011), and despite previous evidence that maternal health has struggled to find a place on the global policy agenda (Shiffman and Smith, 2007), it is now clear that the promotion of health for mothers and children is a staple of both government and private donor commitments. On humanitarian grounds, it makes sense to focus on maternal health and survival in the Global South. (...) Death related to pregnancy or childbirth is a disheartening example of needless suffering. But beyond the initial impulse to reduce suffering, what motivates and/or requires action for addressing injustice in the form of distributional inequities for maternal and reproductive health? In this article, I make a case for the necessity and validity of transnational cooperation to address maternal mortality and morbidity in the Global South. The first component of my argument addresses the transnational elements of both global interconnectedness and responsibility to act. These elements are drawn from Iris Marion Young’s philosophical justification for North-South responsibility-taking. The second component of my argument adds the concept of affective solidarity to that of transnational responsibility. My argument in this section draws from Iris Marion Young’s earlier work on identity (Young, 1990) and embodiment (Young, 1984) and expands the analysis of affective solidarity as a form of both embodiment and political commitment in order to explain the mechanism for transnational connection and understanding. And the final component of my argument explains how both of these elements – transnational responsibility and affective solidarity – support a theory of transnational maternal feminism. (shrink)

The article contributes to the debate on new materialism commenced by Sara Ahmed (2008). Taking up Lena Gunnarsson’s (2013) argument that erasing distinctions is no effective antidote to dualistic theorising, the article argues that Karen Barad’s (2003, 2007) theory is problematic on this count. Whereas Barad dilutes the theoretical distinction between mind and matter as well as that between the animate and the inanimate, the contention here is that it is ethically and politically vital to hold on to a notion (...) of subjectivity understood in terms of the capacity for experience, on account of which sentient being is exposed to suffering. This requires accentuating the passive dimension of subjectivity rather than merely the active dimension of matter. This article contests Barad’s reinscription of a masculinist devaluation of passivity on the grounds that only by moving beyond it can we overcome the hierarchical opposition of subject versus object and, in consequence, of mind versus matter. (shrink)

This article develops a framework for conceptualizing the emotional dimensions of coalitions, with particular focus on how power operates through emotion in different varieties of feminist coalitions. The article proposes three interrelated areas in which emotion shapes feminist coalitions: Feelings towards coalition partners: feelings of mistrust, anger, fear, or their reverse grow from histories of interaction and unequal power. These make up the emotional landscape of intersectional coalitions, which operate through a tension between negative emotions and attempts at empathy or (...) mutual acceptance; Shared feelings: feminist coalitions build on shared fear of threat or anger at a common enemy; and emergent emotions in collective action. Coalition partners possess distinct emotion cultures. Joint collective action can cement bonds when all participants’ emotion cultures are reflected, or weaken coalitions when the reverse is true. In all three of these areas, organizers engage in emotional labour in order to create or maintain coalitions. These three dynamics are illustrated with examples from intersectional feminist coalitions, the Women’s Marches, and interactions between feminists and conservatives opposed to pornography. (shrink)

Due to its wide-ranging reservations and lack of effective enforcement mechanisms the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) has failed to dismantle widespread and systemic discrimination. The present paper proposes a broad, theoretical, preventive and relational approach to creating and enhancing the effectiveness of novel interventions to accelerate gender equality. We describe the main elements of affective empathy (i.e. intersubjectivity, multisensory engagement and empathic embodiment) and identify potential interventions that build on those elements to (...) advance gender equality. We ultimately argue that increased empathy towards women, transwomen and girls is required to disrupt the beliefs and behaviours that lead to discrimination, and that these changes must be enacted alongside legislative reforms and community education that construct equality environments. Our affective empathy framework could have the capacity to operationalise the normative fight against gender stereotypes and inequality in line with article 5(a) of CEDAW. (shrink)

Education theorists have emphasized that transformative learning is not simply a matter of students gaining access to new knowledge and information, but instead centers upon personal transformation: it alters students’ perspectives, interpretations, and responses. How should learning that brings about this sort of self-transformation be understood from the perspectives of philosophy of mind and cognitive science? Jack Mezirow has described transformative learning primarily in terms of critical reflection, meta-cognitive reasoning, and the questioning of assumptions and beliefs. And within mainstream philosophy (...) of mind, there has been a long-standing assumption that cognition and thought are brain-based, computational, disembodied processes that occur separately from emotion and affect. According to this view, selftransformation might be construed as the forging of new neural connections and the development of new cognitive “programs.” However, I will argue that the literature on embodiment and enactivism that has emerged in recent years offers us a different and more productive way to conceptualize the intended effects of transformative learning. From the standpoint of enactivism, the experience of transformative learning is thoroughly bound up with the cognitive shifts that it involves, and it also involves significant changes to the neurobiological dynamics of the living body. Moreover, personal transformation is not simply something that happens to subjects, but rather a process in which they are actively and dynamically engaged. In addition, this enactivist approach emphasizes that the learning process is fully embodied and fundamentally affective. From a phenomenological perspective, personal transformation can be understood as a pronounced alteration in cognitive-affective orientation; and from a neurobiological perspective, the development of new habits of mind can be understood as the formation of highly integrated patterns of bodily engagement and response. The upshot is that it is not just subjects’ brains that are altered over the course of transformative learning, but also their overall bodily and affective attunement to their surroundings. (shrink)