Abstract
Tears have long been documented in human culture. Tracing their history reveals the very different ways culture has shaped their expression and meaning. In more recent history, human tears have been thought to signify an internalised psychological state, with displays ruled by particular constraining forces within Western society. In this essay, I propose a reconceptualising of tears instead as intra-active cultural, political, social, material and affective phenomena (Barad, 2007). This reconceptualization is stimulated by (and in the context of) the social practice of counselling, and within that, the process of becoming a counsellor. I draw on data gathered with a diverse group of counsellors-in-training over the period of one year using a collective biography methodology. Engaging in a diffractive, rather than reflexive, process of data analysis, which marks a decentring of the individual subject of inquiry, and instead requires an opening up to the intra-active flows, matter, and material-discursive practices, I document how tears came to matter, both as an object of analysis, and for counsellors-in-training, in relation to the multiple forces enacting them.
Highlights
Tears have long been documented in human culture
In/animate flux of me-you-boys-who’ve-gone but will leave marks on bodies that will not erase. The moment, because it really was only a moment, this poem refers to occurred at the end of a counselling supervision session where I was in the role of supervisor with a counsellor-client whom I had been working with for about two years
The moment this poem depicts is of the emergence of tears, mine, they were not the only tears present. These were not glassy or watery eyes, but tears rolling down my cheeks, this is perhaps the first time I had experienced this in a counselling session, despite the years I have spent sitting with people telling me the most agonizing and painful stories
Summary
A fantail rests on the table part object, becoming child— its flight sweeps through me. In/animate flux of me-you-boys-who’ve-gone but will (not) leave marks on bodies that will not erase The moment, because it really was only a moment, this poem refers to occurred at the end of a counselling supervision session where I was in the role of supervisor with a counsellor-client whom I had been working with for about two years. A recognizable grief induced response—weeping at the loss of her brother—the scholar who produced this translation argued that the story was related to a springtime tribal ritual which moved from communal weeping and wailing to hysterical and raucous laughing over the course of several days In this ritual, “frantic crying and raucous laughter are not opposed emotional displays but part of a continuum” (Lutz 1999, 34) which viewed such emotional expression as a source of fundamental pleasure and social cohesion. Such affective practices stand in stark contrast to the power of the contemporary neoliberal discourse that prioritizes and constitutes individuals as autonomous, rational, self-maximizing, economically productive subjects (Davies & Bansel 2007; McAvoy 2015)
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