Post-post-structuralism? The Sensual(ist) Turn or Thinking Affects
Professor Valerie Hey
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/education/cheer
12 March, 2016
Aims of the Session
To acknowledge the role of emotions in feminist politics and
ideas
To explore the feminist remaking of the discipline of sociology
To situate and describe further intellectual trends & resources
comprising ‘the affective turn’
To describe research framed by a psycho-social optic
To site the Academy as affect-bearing and distributing
To invite comments on some implications
12 March, 2016
Feminism’s politics and embodied
experience is more than a ‘turn’
The politicisation of ‘experience’
involved action and theory-making
The production of a new language of
analysis
The jouissance and ‘ugly feelings’ of
women’s liberation
Identities and difference
12 March, 2016
Feminists In the Academy : ‘The
war of conceptual attrition’
Sociology’s grammar focussed on the public sphere, the
world of paid labour, took gender & the ‘family’ as
normative. Atheoretical ‘naturalistic’ version of bodies
emotions, feelings.
 Knowledge wars or ‘The dirty history of feminism and
sociology: or the war of conceptual attrition’
(Skeggs, 2008)
12 March, 2016
A Sociology without Feeling:
: A Poststructuralism without Passion?
 Sociology is neither sensual nor about the sensate:
‘...sociology is conspicuously inadequate …Physicality, humanity,
imagination, the other, fear, the limits of control: all are missing in their
own terms, in their own dynamic...[in order to produce insights which
are] ‘imaginative, sensual even, in that they speak to experience,
which includes the senses rather than simply cognition’
(Barrett, M. 2000).
 Discursive ‘determinism’ ? or is there (theoretical) life beyond
Foucault?
12 March, 2016
CCCS: Representing feminism
Hall talks of the reconstruction enacted by feminism as :
‘ a thief in the night, it broke in, interrupted, made an
unseemly noise, seized the time, crapped on the table of
cultural studies’
(Hall, 1992:282)
The Emergence of the Psychosocial as
an Optic
 Explosion of wider academic
interest in identity as ‘a becoming’
implicating feelings, emotion and
affect = plural vocabularies
express different disciplines
conceptual vocabulary
 Inter-disciplinary work across
Psychology and Sociology - now
entangled + neuroscience
 Cultural Studies encompassed the
aesthetic and embodied aspects of
life - feelings, emotions, affects –
the conscious and unconscious –
desire, investments
12 March, 2016
Unstable Objects: Emotion or
Affects?
Wetherell’s account of affect & emotion includes the way emotion
is understood in psychology as a grammar for describing singular
bodily states (fear, shame, pride, etc.) as well as the affective
covering a ‘wilder more encompassing project highlighting
difference, process and force’ (2012, 2).
Probyn, in contrast, splits the difference in the opposite way :
‘A basic distinction is that emotion refers to cultural and social
expression, whereas affects are of a biological and physiological
nature’ (2005: 11).
12 March, 2016
The virtue of hospitality to different
theories
Clarke’s recent helpful review of ‘psychoanalytic sociology’ (2006) advocates that we
recognise, in the complex legacy of work on
emotions, an effort in the best work to try
and hold onto rather than eliminate the tensions
between the biological, the interactional,
social constructionism and psycho-analysis
rather than adopt a prematurely inflexible
and unhelpful position—one that defines ‘the
field of emotions’ with certainty. This
requires a deference and respect to the different
provenance of ideas which in their
nature bring ambiguity and fragility in their
wake. (Leathwood & Hey 2009 p 431).
12 March, 2016
It’s OK to be confused!
Any social theory worthy of its ambition
requires a space for enigmatic, chaotic,
incoherent, and structurally
contradictory attachments; it needs a
way to assess the attachment needs
that put people in relation without
promising to deliver “a life” that feels
cushioned. There is no cure for
ambivalence.
(Lauren Berlant, 2011, Cultural
Anthropology; 26 (4)
12 March, 2016
Feminist psycho-social approaches
Feminists Un/do the Masters !
12 March, 2016
Feminism After Bourdieu
Feminist Bourdieusian approaches : Reay,(2005); Skeggs,(1997) – the concept
of habitus enhanced by a recognition of how class/classification ‘feels’ and how
gender works as affective processes.
‘the habitus - embodied habitus, internalised as second nature and so forgotten
as history – is the active presence of the whole past of which it
is the
product.’
(Bourdieu, 1992:56).
12 March, 2016
Class Interests & Motivated
unconsciousness

‘The affective entailed in “interest” in collective/group
constructions of boundaries and affinities based
on the logic of interested calculation which works at the level
of the unconscious……how both affect is
used and produced by institutions and how it simmers in every
evaluation that is made of people’
(Skeggs, 2002).
12 March, 2016
Emotion as a way of apprehending
the world’ (Ahmed, 2004)
‘Emotions do things, and they align individuals with communities or bodily
space with social space through the very intensity of their
attachments.
Rather than seeing emotions as psychological dispositions,
consider how they work, in concrete and particular ways, to
relationship between the psychic and the social, and
individual and the collective. (Ahmed 2004a, 119) emphasis
we need to
mediate the
between the
added
12 March, 2016
Feminism After Freud
Walkerdine, Lucey & Melody’s (2001) take on class desires and
investments – messy subjectivity not heroic but all too human
‘[part of] the development of a form of theory of the subject
which
did not accept the notion of ‘false consciousness’ but recognised, a
desiring consciousness expressing the lures and contradictions of the
social, since ‘everything is social’
(Hey, 2011)
12 March, 2016
Butler In/Against Freud
Butler’s deconstructive epistemology – ‘troubling gender’ via the
vocabulary of subjectification, performativity, intelligibility – re/citation
yet humanist thread in her ontology of the subject:
‘Moreover this situation of primary dependency conditions the
political formation and regulation of subjects ...The one who holds
out the promise of continued existence plays to the desire to
survive.’
(Butler, 1997,7 cited in Hey & Leathwood, 2009)
12 March, 2016
Construing a ‘psychosocial logic of enquiry’
A post-structural study exploring how unremarkable difference is made
to matter in the emotion-laden practices and processes of
friendship – thus the structural power of class, race, gender &
heterosexuality takes cultural force and form.
(Hey, 1997) The Company She Keeps: an ethnography of girls’
friendship.
Turning the gaze back on the maker of knowledge – to ask who is the ‘
I’ we bring into being when we represent ‘the Other’ ?
(Hey, 2009) The Girl in the Mirror; the Psychic Economy of Class in
Girlhood Studies : an Interdisciplinary Journal (2009).
12 March, 2016
Difficult and Dissident Theory
‘I want to suggest that it is possible to read ‘difficulty’ as an
important ethical component of the radical democratic project
within which Butler continues to situate her work … Butler is
well aware that her texts are labour intensive, but I hope it will
become clear that this labour potentially effects the making of
politically dissident readers […] who are prompted to question
the limitations of their ‘linguistic horizons’ along with the
exclusionary schemes of intelligibility which currently pass for the
ontological norm.
(Salih, 2003, p. 43; emphasis added cited in Hey, 2006, p443)
12 March, 2016
The Affective Economy of the
Academy
The calculus of rational actor theory
 The dominance given to naïve realist views aligned with neoliberal realism (Wendy Brown)
The toxic politics of narcissistic individualism
Yet :
The truth of human and system vulnerability & interdependency
Not entirely captured by the system
Bodily rebellions ?
Mental qualms – the certainty of uncertainty
12 March, 2016
Feminist Critique is Captured?
Feminists Are Undone by the Masters !
12 March, 2016
Feminism, Fashion and Difference
Some questions:
 Has feminist theory moved from the realm of the necessity of
resistance into reproduction?
 Are there any political consequences for feminism of material
generational differences among ‘vintage’ feminists and younger
feminists?
 What new imaginaries can assist us in thinking outside the
‘master’ discourses and the ‘discourse of the master’?
12 March, 2016
Resources for further reading
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Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2004. 224 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 0–7486–1847–3, £16.99
Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and
Citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. 308 pp. (incl. index).
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ISBN 0–8223–1924–1, £17.50
Lauren Berlant, ed., Intimacy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. 455 pp.
(incl. index). ISBN 0–226–38443–8, £16.00
Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca, NY: University of Cornell Press,
2004. 227 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 0–8014–8862–1, £12.95
Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public
Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. 355 pp. (incl. index).
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ISBN 0–8223–3088–1, £18.50
Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 422 pp.
(incl. index). ISBN 0–674–01536–3, £19.95; paperback edition, 2007,
ISBN 0–674–02409–5, £10.95
12 March, 2016
Resources for further reading
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Elspeth Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2005. 197 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 0–8166–2721–5, £14.00
Denise Riley, Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2005. 142 pp. ISBN 0–8223–3512–3, £12.95
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2003. 195 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 0–8223–3015, £15.50
Elspeth Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2005. 197 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 0–8166–2721–5, £14.00
Denise Riley, Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2005. 142 pp. ISBN 0–8223–3512–3, £12.95
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2003. 195 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 0–8223–3015, £15.50
Margaret Wetherell (2012) Affect and Emotion : A New Social Science Understanding , London, Sage
12 March, 2016