Strand 5

Affect, emotion, feeling, mood

Coordinators: Demet Gulcicek, University of Warwick; Ilenia Caleo, University IUAV of Venice; Annalisa Sacchi, University IUAV of Venice; Sibel Yardimci, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University.

→ abstracts to be sent to: efrc.strand5@gmail.com, info@atgender.eu 

Feminist researchers are often hesitant to use the term the ‘affective turn’ – a term used to point out the recent increase on thinking about the affective relations, in company of some terms such as emotion, feeling, and mood (Cvetkovich, 2012). They refer to the problematisations of objectivity, essentialism, public-private division in addition to rethinking of personal as political, everyday experiences, personal narratives, emotional labour discussed in feminist thinking over decades, especially through criticising the binary of women/emotion and men/reason. Building on these contributions, and putting affect as the object of analysis, feminist researchers invited us to rethink power, embodiment, discourse, ambivalence, materiality.

The broad term affect theory not only challenges the individualistic understandings of emotion, feeling, and mood; but also criticises approaching them as side effects of social and cultural relations. Affective relations are not simply produced by politics, but are also constitutive of them. As one of the most highlighted questions ‘what do emotions do?’ indicates, affective relations are in the centre of politics, protests, social media, everyday life. This question reflects the methodological, epistemological, and ontological interests of affect theory, a step back from simply describing emotions in the social and cultural arenas.

This strand invites contributions that has empirical, theoretical, and methodological reflections on the following (but not limited to) topics:

  • Body, power, movements, agency

  • Politics of affect & political affects

  • Public feelings, intimate public, social media

  • Ambiguity, complexity, affective relations

  • Intimacies, friendships, sexual relationships & queer commons

  • Ability-disability, transability, age

  • Feminist theory, intersectionality, critical race, queer theories

  • Nostalgia, nationalism, (de)colonialism, neoliberalism

  • Affective pedagogies and affect in teaching

  • Negative emotions, non-normative affects

  • Criticisms of Western conceptualisations of affect

  • Cultural memories