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Beschreibung

Against Affect interrogates shibboleths of feeling and reason and their relationship with ideas of identity, gender, and freedom in the twenty-first century. Lisa Downing starts with the familiar premise that emotion has been historically gendered and racialized since the Enlightenment, with women, people of color, and other non-normative subjects associated with emotionality, and only white men with logic and reason. The "affective turn" in the academic humanities attempted to redress this injustice in the 1990s, and affect theory, ubiquitous today, revalorized precisely what was excluded from logos: the bodily, the emotive, and the experiential. But how effective has this strategy truly been in changing perceptions of marginalized forms of knowledge and subjectivity? Against Affect argues that the academic affective turn has prompted a broader cultural one, marked by increasing prioritization—and exploitation—of feeling over reason, issuing from both the political left and right.

Using a series of case studies, Against Affect explores how the deployment of a language of emotion in both the academic and cultural spheres constitutes a new normativity. In thinking against affect, Downing questions the efficacy and desirability of idealizing feeling and proposes instead the redistribution of reason.

Against Affect interrogates shibboleths of feeling and reason and their relationship with ideas of identity, gender, and freedom in the twenty-first century. Lisa Downing starts with the familiar premise that emotion has been historically gendered and racialized since the Enlightenment, with women, people of color, and other non-normative subjects associated with emotionality, and only white men with logic and reason. The "affective turn" in the academic humanities attempted to redress this injustice in the 1990s, and affect theory, ubiquitous today, revalorized precisely what was excluded from logos: the bodily, the emotive, and the experiential. But how effective has this strategy truly been in changing perceptions of marginalized forms of knowledge and subjectivity? Against Affect argues that the academic affective turn has prompted a broader cultural one, marked by increasing prioritization—and exploitation—of feeling over reason, issuing from both the political left and right.

Using a series of case studies, Against Affect explores how the deployment of a language of emotion in both the academic and cultural spheres constitutes a new normativity. In thinking against affect, Downing questions the efficacy and desirability of idealizing feeling and proposes instead the redistribution of reason.

Über den Autor

Lisa Downing is Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. She is the author or editor of twenty books, including Selfish Women and After Foucault: Culture, Theory, and Criticism in the 21st Century. She is an editor of Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory.

Inhaltsverzeichnis
Acknowledgements
Provocations
Introduction
1. Repairing What Wasn’t Broken: Queer Theory’s Affective Turn
2. Why Aren’t We Minding Our Own Shoes? On Empathy
3. Words as Weapons: The Tyranny of Vulnerability
4. If Reason Went Viral: Rethinking Vulnerability in Covid-19 Culture
Conclusion: For a Feminist Neo-Enlightenment
Notes
Details
Erscheinungsjahr: 2026
Genre: Importe, Soziologie
Rubrik: Wissenschaften
Medium: Taschenbuch
Inhalt: Einband - flex.(Paperback)
ISBN-13: 9781496242303
ISBN-10: 1496242300
Sprache: Englisch
Einband: Kartoniert / Broschiert
Autor: Downing, Lisa
Hersteller: Nebraska
Verantwortliche Person für die EU: Libri GmbH, Europaallee 1, D-36244 Bad Hersfeld, gpsr@libri.de
Maße: 202 x 128 x 12 mm
Von/Mit: Lisa Downing
Erscheinungsdatum: 01.04.2026
Gewicht: 0,179 kg
Artikel-ID: 134881797

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