Feeling neoliberal

Abstract

AbstractWe live in a time of feelings. Anger, disgust, and anxiety abound in the public sphere and in social analyses. Positive feelings are also increasingly demanded and exchanged in the capitalist marketplace, including care and empathy, tenderness and affection. Indeed, the intensity with which feelings traverse these boundaries of individual‐social‐cultural‐political‐economic life is arguably a defining feature of our times. Yet much of the scholarship on neoliberalism has focused squarely upon the extractive and exhausting quality of contemporary affective life. Strikingly, feminist affect theory in particular interprets a fundamental cruelty at the core of cultural demands for optimism (Berlant 2011) or happiness (Ahmed 2010), a dark underbelly that forecloses any other transformative outcomes. In this essay, I suggest that feminist ethnographic analysis requires a more complex account of affective pursuits. I turn to the specific context of the post‐colonial Caribbean island of Barbados, where a new surge in desires for intimacy, emotional expressiveness, and affective life is bound up within the 21st century thrust of neoliberal entrepreneurialism. In a society known more for its conservative 'stiff‐upper lip' and 'grin‐and‐bear‐it' demeanor, 'tough love,' and material, transactional modes of support and exchange than expressions of intimate affection, I chart a growing desire for new modes of feeling, a growing cultural pull toward romantic love and intimacy, and emotional expressivity itself. I read within these Barbadian desires (and even within their disappointments) a profound optimism, pleasure, and bold self‐discovery that does not only/always succumb to despair.