Pervasive feminism is a component located in emotionality—feminist emotion—and contains women's primary agency. Because affect and emotions are elusive, an interpretive conceptual tool is necessary and is key to making use of their potential for feminist politics aimed at women's empowerment and well-being and to build gender equality. This essay builds on contemporary feminist theory and affect theory and draws from multidisciplinary research. It presents a new theoretical framework anchored in hermeneutics and phenomenology to pin down the affective component of (...) women's multifaceted, intersectional emotional experiences of gender. A case study also illustrates how the theoretical premises around the concept of feminist emotion are compatible with and useful for feminist praxis. (shrink)

This paper takes Deleuze's idea ‘to green’ as a qualitative predicate which becomes a rhizomatic event where Jesper Hoffmeyer's ‘plant being’ contemplates through waves and rhythms, hence affects and percepts. The article then brings forward an intertwined group of Chinese ideograms which are designed with plant-radicals, making up an ecosystem towards the establishment of a new Chinese ecocriticism under the banner of biosemiotics. Such an effort will, hopefully, widen the scope and dimension of the new field of environmental humanities, with (...) an emphasis on the scenario of affective attuning to the agency of vegetal life. The main purpose is to put Deleuze and Guattari's form-event assemblage within the stratification of regimes of signs in A Thousand Plateaus, in order to establish a ‘natureculture’ continuity not only between science and art, but also between a Western rethinking of language/culture and a Chinese ecosystem/ecocriticism. (shrink)

Sociologists usually conceive of emotions as individual, episodic, and categorical phenomena while emphasizing their social and cultural construction. At the same time, the term emotion refers to a wide range of conceptually and ontologically distinct components and is therefore best thought of as a relatively unspecific umbrella term. This article argues that the routes leading to the social and cultural construction of emotion, for example, norms, rules, values, and discourse, are unlikely to be applicable to each of these components in (...) the same way. This is particularly true for an element of emotion that is often portrayed as being most essential and basic and therefore to some extent avoiding the formative forces of culture and society, namely, affect. Although affect is an established notion in sociology, it has remained conceptually underdeveloped. The article therefore discusses different perspectives on affect from cultural studies that emphasize its relational and bodily character. In a second step, it contrasts and reconciles these views with existing theories of affect in sociology and social psychology and considers a number of essential characteristics that can be used to circumscribe affect and its social and cultural correlates. Finally, concepts from relational sociology are introduced and concrete examples to specify the relational character of affect and to develop an understanding of affect, that is both theoretically fruitful and conducive to empirical research, are discussed. (shrink)

This article will look closely at the performance of tomboy identity in Joan Anim-Addo's collection of poetry Janie, Cricketing Lady, written as a tribute to her mother Jane Joseph, and Margaret Cezair-Thompson's novel The Pirate's Daughter, a fiction about Errol Flynn's ‘outside’ Jamaican daughter, May. It will argue that the ongoing affects of colonialism and patriarchy in the islands of Grenada and Jamaica, respectively, shape the life narratives of Janie and May who express their anger, shame, fear, frustration and desire (...) through their ambiguous gender identity and through their determination to intervene in masculinist traditions, such as cricket, piracy and adventure, traditions that underpin Caribbean his/tories. To understand the way in which affect can be expressed through tomboyism in Caribbean societies, it is necessary to look at colour and class alongside gender in the context of Caribbean creolisation. (shrink)

Linguistic invention is a key feature of Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves. An exploration of its innovative verbal and syntactic procedures can add to an understanding of Woolf's importance for the philosophical thought of Gilles Deleuze (and his sometime collaborator Félix Guattari). In A Thousand Plateaus, The Waves is used to exemplify an ontology of becoming. However, in their reference to The Waves, Deleuze and Guattari only draw attention to what they term the ‘vibrations, shifting borderlines’ between and across characters (...) in the novel. Given Deleuze's considerations of style, it is perhaps surprising that he never took up this idea in terms of how these movements also take place at the level of language in the novel, as the explorations in this essay of four different linguistic procedures from The Waves show. When Woolf completed writing The Waves, she wrote in her diary that she had ‘netted that fin in the waste of water’. By investigating the multiple, and often discordant, associations of this image of netting a fin, various connections between Woolf's linguistic procedures and Deleuze's philosophy can be configured, particularly in terms of the approach to language put forward in A Thousand Plateaus. Reading Woolf alongside Deleuze in this way reveals how ontology becomes intimately bound up with a problem of language. (shrink)

This article takes up the work of Judith Butler in order to present a vision of ethics that avoids two common yet problematic positions: on the one hand, the skeptical position that ethical norms are so constitutive of who we are that they are ultimately impossible to assess and, on the other hand, the notion that we are justified in our commitment to any ethical norm that appears foundational to our identity. With particular attention to the trajectory of Butler’s project (...) from The Psychic Life of Power to Giving an Account of Oneself, the article discusses the shortcomings of these two positions and the virtues of the alternative account that Butler develops during this period. (shrink)

Current notions of affect are often underpinned by unacknowledged assumptions about spontaneity, materiality and immediacy. Childhood, which has traditionally been associated with these concepts (and for this reason has not been much debated within critical theory), helps us reconsider the political impact of affect theory. This is both because feminist theory has recently reconceptualized childhood and because positing affect as moments of intensity immanent to matter raises a number of problems from a feminist point of view. A passage from Mrs. (...) Dalloway (illustrating how childhood works as a mimetic break within the project of literary modernism) will introduce an analysis of excerpts from Lisa Cartwright and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, two feminist case studies in which affect and childhood are linked. Referring to past psychoanalytical and political debates (especially by Jacqueline Rose, Juliet Mitchell and Walter Benjamin) that have anticipated some of the problems we are currently facing within feminist theory, the article investigates through childhood the politically problematic role of affect as ‘the new’ in critical theory. (shrink)