Affect Embodiment Agency 1
Winter 2017
Introduction to Affect Theory
Winter 2017
Time TBA Room TBA
Eszter Timár Z508/A
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One of the main theoretical anchor points of poststructuralist feminist and queer theory is the Foucauldean insight that power, conceived of as a dynamically shifting system of force relations, is everywhere. A corollary of this insight concerns the necessary rethinking of our conventional understandings of what Butler calls the voluntaristic subject who claims recognition and emancipation based on a distinct experience and its relationship to the concept of embodiment. This course explores the way in which this rethinking can conceive of embodiment as a process of affective agency. The readings of the course, whose focus range from anthropology, Foucauldean understandings of gendered embodiment, psychoanalysis, affect theory, queer theory, disability studies, to new materialism, offer different ways of suggesting that the agency of affective embodiement both produces and exceeds the voluntarist subject of emancipation.
Learning outcomes: At the end of the course, students will be familiar with Foucault’s theory of modern biopower, and will be able to connect it to the ways subsequent feminist and queer theory either made use if this theory. Students will also be familiar with the most important arguments in affect theory and how they inform new materialism.
Requirements:
Class participation will include group presentations, and there will be one written assignment in the form of a 2500-word paper.
Class participation:
You are required to attend class consistently. Please come to class having read, and bringing with you, the assigned texts. Your active participation (listening as well as speaking) will be expected. Generally, the more active class participation is in a class, the more intellectually stimulating it becomes, so I hope that you will always share your thoughts during discussion. You may miss one class without formal documentation of illness or any other case of vis major. Please let me know in advance if you know you won’t come to class.
Group presentations:
The time and organization of this component will depend on class size and we will design it together.
Grading:
Attendance and participation: 30%
Group presentation: 20%
Paper: 50%
Note on extensions: If you need an extension on any of the paper deadline, email me at least two days prior to the deadline (I will most likely grant an extension). I may not honor requests that come in last minute.
Note on plagiarism: It is your responsibility to make sure that your written work does not include any plagiarism (make sure you clearly mark your notes including quotations for yourself in order to avoid accidentally pasting them in your text). Any assignment found containing plagiarism will receive an F with no guaranteed possibility of rewriting and you’ll receive an email notification of the problem.
Schedule
week 1:
Ann Pellegrini and Jasbir Puar: “Affect,” Social Text 100 • Vol. 27, No. 3 • Fall 2009, pp. 35-38.
week 2:
Donald Nathanson: “Prologue,” in Silvan Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, vols. 1 and 2, (New York: Springer Publishing Company), 2008, pp. xi-xxiv.
week 3 :
Susan Bordo: “Feminism, Foucault, and the Politics of the Body,” pp. 245-257, in Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (eds.), Feminist theory and the Body, A Reader (New York: Routledge), 1999.
Elizabeth Grosz: “Psychoanalysis and the Body,” pp. 267-271, in Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (eds.), Feminist theory and the Body, A Reader (New York: Routledge), 1999.
week 4:
Judith Butler: “Subjection, Resistance, Resignification: Between Freud and Foucault,” The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 1997, 83-105.
week 5:
Nancy Chodorow: “Individuality and Difference in How Women and Men Love,” 89-105 in 83-105, Anthony Elliott and Stephen Frosh (eds.), Psychoanalysis in Contexts: Paths between Theory and Modern Culture (London and New York: Routledge), 1995.
Riki Lane: “Trans as Bodily Becoming: Rethinking the Biological as Diversity, Not Dichotomy,” Hypatia, Volume 24, Issue 3, (Summer 2009), pp. 136–157.
week 6:
Brian Massumi: “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique, No. 31, (Autumn, 1995), pp. 83-109.
week 7:
week 8:
Sara Ahmed: “The Performativity of Disgust,” The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 2004, pp. 82-100.
Elspeth Probyn: “Everyday Shame,” Cultural Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2-3 (2004), pp. 328-349.
week 9:
Elaine Hatfield et. al.: “New Perspectives on Emotional Contagion: A Review of Classic and Recent Research on Facial Mimicry and Contagion,” Interpersona, Vol. 8(2) (2004), pp. 159–179.
JoséEstebanMuñoz: “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position,” Signs, Vol. 31, No. 3, (Spring 2006), pp. 675-688.
week 10:
Rosemarie Garland Thomson: “Seeing the Disabled: Visual Rhetorics in Popular Photography,” pp. 335-374 in Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky, eds. The New Disability History: American Perspectives (New York and London: New York University Press, 2001).
Robert McRuer: “Crip Eye for the Normate Guy: Queer Theory and the Disciplining of Disability Studies,” PMLA, Vol. 120, No. 2 (2005), pp. 586-592.
week 11:
Judith Halberstam: “The Queer Art of Failure,” in The Queer Art of Failure (Durham and London: Duke University Press), 2011, pp. 87-123.
Eva Hayward: “Sensational Jellyfish: Aquarium Affects and the Matter of Immersion,” differences, Volume 23, Number 3 (2012), pp. 161-196.
week 12:
Tracy McNulty: “Demanding the Impossible: Desire and Social Change,” differences, Volume 20, Number 1 (2009), pp. 1-39.
Sara Ahmed: “The Skin of the Community: Affect and Boundary Formation,” pp. 95-111 in Tina Chanter and Ewa Płonowska Ziarek (eds.), Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis, (Albany: SUNY Press), 2005.
This syllabus is subject to change.