Theorizing emotion and affect

Abstract

There is a long history of theoretical work on emotion and affect. Indeed Ann Cvetkovich argues that ‘the representation of social problems as affective dilemmas can be traced to its origins in eighteenthand nineteenth-century culture’ (1992: 2). More recently, in the 1980s, feminist theorists such as Lila Abu-Lughod (1986), Arlie Russell Hochschild (1985), bell hooks (1989), Alison Jaggar (1989), Audre Lorde (1984), Elizabeth Spelman (1989) and Catherine Lutz (1988) took interest in women's emotional lives and labours. While these earlier influences are still resonant, it is only over the last decade that we have witnessed what Woodward (1996), Berlant (1997) and Nicholson (1999) have referred to as an ‘affective turn’. Interestingly, this turn is not specific to cultural studies; it extends into the field of neurology, where writers such as Antonio Damasio (1994, 2003) have reconsidered the connection between emotion and rationality. Other work on emotion and affect, such as Robert Solomon's In Defense of Sentimentality (2004) and The Passions: Emotion and the Meaning of Life (1993), Jack Katz's How Emotions Work (1999), Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought (2001), Jenefer Robinson's Deeper Than Reason (2005), David Eng and David Kazanjian's On Loss (2003), Brian Massumi's Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002), Rei Terada's Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” (2001), Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert's The New Individualism: The Emotional Costs of Globalisation (2006), to name but a few, illustrate the renewed and continuing interest in this field and its significance within critical theory.

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