Affective Economy Research Articles

Branding the Right: The Affective Economy of Sarah Palin

Branding the Right:The Affective Economy of Sarah Palin Laurie Ouellette (bio) In April 2010, Saturday Night Live announced the launch of the Sarah Palin Network. Impersonating the former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate, comedian Tina Fey pitched the new television channel as the logical extension of her commentator gig with Fox News and her TLC reality program, Sarah Palin's Alaska. Poking fun at Palin's hokey right-wing populism and media saturation strategies, Fey promised TV viewers propagandistic made-for-television movies, game shows like Tea Party Wheel of Fortune and Are You Smarter Than a Half-Term Governor?; reality competitions like Dancing with the Real Stars: America's Small Business Owners; a renegade cops-and-robbers drama featuring Todd Palin on a snowmobile; and a public affairs program geared to ordinary people called Elites, in which C-SPAN-like footage of "smarty pants experts" is redubbed with the teacher's monotonous voice from the Charlie Brown cartoons. The hilarity of the skit hinged on the uncanny possibility of an actual Sarah Palin Network. Given the extent to which Palin's overnight celebrity was channeled into a lucrative brand across print, television, film, and digital media platforms, the prospect of an entire network devoted to perpetuating—and profiting from—the unlikely politician from Wasilla is not so far fetched. Since entering the national spotlight as John McCain's running mate, Palin has built a pop culture franchise around her campaign image of an average hockey mom whose approach to how the nation should be governed combines kitchen-table economics and the rugged self-reliance ascribed to the Alaskan frontier. From the outset, her self-billing as a Washington outsider has been fashioned against the malfeasance of the "media elite." Upon accepting the vice presidential nomination at the 2008 Republican National Convention, Palin dismissed journalists who questioned her qualifications as "snobs who look down their noses at ordinary Americans and are out of touch with [End Page 185] their major concerns."1 In subsequent speeches, interviews, and tweets, she pitched herself as an authentic representation of "real" America against the "lamestream" media and pretentious, big-city elites, who favor big government and other evils. To be sure, the media also perpetuated this spin on Palin, playing up her folksiness and articulating her deficiencies as a professional ruler in class-coded cultural and geographical terms. Venues from SNL to the New York Review of Books have delighted in reiterating Palin's nasal working-class accent, grammatical mishaps, chain-store tastes, carnivorous appetites (she's fond of moose and caribou), and penchant for "faux-genteel cuss words like dang, heck, darn, geez, bullcrap, and bass-ackwards."2 Palin ups the ante by channeling the mockery into the purported authenticity of her homegrown political brand. In fact, while she defines her political persona in opposition to the media elite, Palin's enduring visibility since the 2008 election evidences a strategic mastery of both old and new media forms. Well before Palin disappointed her fans by declining to run in the 2012 presidential primary, a long exposé in New York magazine called "The Revolution Will Be Commercialized" suggested that her motivation for branching into popular media was largely financial. Accompanied by graphics that render Palin in the image of Ford, Pepsi, Chevron, and other brand-name logos, the article explains that Palin turned to memoir writing because she was earning $125,000 per year and was plagued by debt; she eventually landed a $7 million deal with HarperCollins. Her best-selling book, Going Rogue: An American Life (2009), was followed by America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag (2010), and former campaign aides were hired to plan book tours with "all the trappings of a national political campaign."3 When the demands of her new cash stream clashed with her day job as governor (and with Alaska's public-sector ethical regulations), she resigned. When Palin subsequently signed a three-year contributor contract with Fox News worth an alleged $1 million per year, she set up a television studio in her home in Wasilla, Alaska. Shortly thereafter she coproduced Sarah Palin's Alaska with Mark Burnett of Survivor...

Trading the Happy Object: Coffee, Colonialism, and Friendly Feeling

Trading the Happy Object: Coffee, Colonialism, and Friendly Feeling

Touching virtual trauma: Performative empathics in Second Life

Trauma has entered the virtual domain of Second Life. Unsanctioned memorials to 9/11 and re-imaginings of a digitized Guantanamo Bay are but some of the more recent installations of traumatic memory to be found in this relatively new online territory. This article seeks to understand how Second Life participates in an affective economy of performative empathy through remediating the traumas of ‘those’ who have suffered ‘elsewhere’. In contemplating one particular online Holocaust museum – the US Holocaust Museum’s Kristallnacht in Second Life, it examines how Second Life participates in the circulation of a range of ‘wound culture’ affects in problematic ways.

The War At Home: Affective Economics and Transnationally Adoptive Families in the United States

The question of how to best conduct post-placement interventions for transnationally adoptive families at risk of dissolution (legal annulment) is an emerging issue in the United States. The current popular trend for adoptive families to pursue biomedical post-placement interventions, despite a lack of proof that such interventions actually work to keep the adoptive family intact, suggests the need for a more phenomenological approach to understanding both adoptive parents’ and transnational adoptees’ post-placement experiences. This study examines the empirical experiences of adoptive families at risk of dissolution in the United States who attempt to define and navigate the path toward family stability after adopting. From the coding of this data set emerge some routes through and by which emotions circulate between adoptive parents and transnational adoptees through the family body and the family social. Particularly, it investigates one post-placement “affective economy” at work in which adoptive parents attempt, through the expression of particular forms of parental love, to align adoptees as subjects of the private, nuclear American family, while adoptees more often attempt to create space for more heterogeneous forms of family, ones that include birth parents and other kin-like relations in their countries of origin. Ultimately, it illuminates some vastly different and sometimes contradictory ways that adoptive parents and adoptees can interpret family through emotional lenses, ones that can prevent a smooth post-placement transition for adoption actors. An understanding of these differences and how they shape, and are shaped by, the post-placement affective economy within families at risk of dissolution may aid in locating indicators for adoption dissolution, and possibly, designing more effective post-placement interventions for families struggling in the aftermath of adoption. It may also help scholars begin to think about the construction and impact of affective economies in the realm of adoption more generally.

Intimate Encounters: Affective Economies in Cuba and the Dominican Republic

Drawing on research in Cuba and the Dominican Republic this paper explores the uses of intimacy in both the corporate sector and in romantic relationships. I use research with hotel workers and with people involved in sexual-affective exchanges connected to tourism to link intimacy to the political economic structures of transnational tourism. These are new spaces of analysis that present practices of transnational corporate-generated intimacy that combine love - or the exploitation of worker's emotions − and labor. The central aim is to intertwine the intimate with the global, from the formal customer service policies of transnational hotels with the informal, on-the-ground, intimate encounters between tourists and hospitality workers. The commercialization of intimacy, including sexual-affective relations in the delivery of hospitality services, is linked to political and economic processes that are part of transnational tourism practices. This paper challenges the notion that sex tour- ism and sex work are individualistic practices that exist outside of the spaces of corporate global profit. It further posits that relationships where money is exchanged are not necessarily devoid of care and intimacy. Keywords: intimate labour, sex tourism, hospitality industry, Cuba, Dominican Republic. During recent travel to the Dominican Republic I booked an online trip that in- cluded airfare and lodging. My aim was to get an inexpensive hotel for my stay during a research trip. I chose to book over the internet because the rapid consoli- dation of travel services through online search engines such as Orbitz or Traveloc- ity bundles airfare, car rentals, and lodging, offering some of the most inexpensive deals available to mass travel consumers. This limits consumers to multinational suppliers in accommodations, since the rapid monopolization of travel services is now controlled by only a handful of transnational corporations (ILO 2001, Dun- ning and McQueen 1982). 1

Belonging in an Adopted World: Race, Identity, and Transnational Adoption (review)

Reviewed by: Belonging in an Adopted World: Race, Identity, and Transnational Adoption Eleana Kim Barbara Yngvesson, Belonging in an Adopted World: Race, Identity, and Transnational Adoption. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010, 264 pp. Transnational adoption first emerged as an object of anthropological inquiry in the late 1990s and early 2000s as large numbers of children joined the intensified flows of people, commodities, ideas, and capital that constitute “globalization.” Not only their numbers, but also their destinations made these border-crossing children increasingly difficult to ignore, as they entered into the home territories of Western anthropologists. Moreover, they troubled the boundaries among various categories of traveling things, raising questions about the nature of these circulations: are children in transnational adoption immigrants, commodities, fantasies, conduits of economic and social capital, or all of the above? Do their migrations and attempts at government regulation represent a liberalization of identity and family forms, or the consolidation of a Western-dominated vision of “right” children and families? For more than a decade, Barbara Yngvesson’s work has been among the most valuable in providing critical theoretical frameworks for answering these questions. Her impressively expansive project attends to the complexity of adoption for all the social actors involved––parents, children, social workers, and child welfare advocates on both sides of the global North-South divide––as well as the legal technologies, international networks, and affective economies that govern it. Belonging in an Adopted World is a seamless monograph that refines and coalesces her previous theoretical and ethnographic contributions to powerful effect. Yngvesson’s (1997) earliest work on adoption examined “open adoptions” in the US, in part inspired by her own experience with such an arrangement at a time well before they had become conventional practice. [End Page 1047] In Belonging in an Adopted World, Yngvesson writes in detail of the circumstances that brought her son Finn into her family, as well as of the relationships that formed around him––between Finn’s adoptive and birth families. This experience literally frames the book (appearing in the Prologue and the Epilogue); yet rather than merely functioning as a reflexive or confessional vignette, it is effectively deployed as autoethnography in the most analytical sense, demonstrating how the author’s knowledge of the dynamics of kinship and identity––which adoption throws into relief and radically into question––is located within the scope of her own unfolding family relations. Yngvesson explains how American adoption law provided the model for adoption laws in Europe and how it has become the standard in international legal conventions, which promote “strong” or plenary adoptions that cancel prior kinship relations and replace them with as-if genealogical adoptive ones. Open adoptions cut against the grain of this standard, but in the process create a hierarchy among birth mothers––those in the global North who are empowered to choose the adopting parents and the extent of their relationships to their children, and those in the South for whom relinquishment is complete and final. For American adoptees of previous generations and transnational adoptees today, the closed, plenary form of adoption produced the opposite effect of the closure intended by legal permanence. Instead, it generated a heightened longing for the “real,” the pre-adoption histories and relations that seem to promise “answers,” truth, resolution, and plenitude. Yngvesson, as a legal anthropologist and participant in an open adoption, understands well the power of the law to instantiate legal fictions as truths against the complexity of people’s lived experiences with the connections and disconnections of kinship. With this understanding of “the work of adoption,” she turns her attention to the domain of transnational, transracial adoption to Sweden, seeking to capture the ways in which the particular structure of transnational adoption provokes a desire for “the real,” motivating searches for genealogical “origins,” and “returns” to the birth mother or birth country. As adoptees who have engaged in searches and returns recognize, “the real” of adoption may promise closure, but, in fact, resists it. Questions to which adoptees sought answers open on to more questions, and the ground of identity threatens to become unstable. The real, as Yngvesson delicately shows, is constituted by the ongoing relations among adoptees, adoptive parents, and...

Transfections of animal touch, techniques of biosecurity

Animal touch – in the broadest sense, biological touch across species lines – emerges as a biosecurity threat within contemporary contexts of pandemic alert. At the same time, animal touch is increasingly invested with therapeutic, healing value within neoliberal economies of affect. This article develops two genealogies of animal touch toward historicizing the way it has come to mean and matter in the present. The first genealogy traces the production of animal touch as a biohazard during the 2009 swine flu scare as well as the increasingly environmental techniques of biosecurity that emerged to “conduct” or govern the risks of animal touch, giving specific attention to hand sanitizer. The second traces the installation of petting areas within the space of the modern zoo, areas specifically devoted to animal touch as a technology of affect. Whether animal touch is framed as a matter of biosecurity or pursued for its tenderizing and therapeutic effects, at stake in the biopolitical practices of both hand sanitation and petting is the phantasmatic sovereignty of the human hand over the sense of touch.

Lost in translation? Emotional intelligence, affective economies, leadership and organizational change

Not until the late 1990s did the rational/emotional binary embedded in mainstream literature on educational leadership and management come under challenge. Now the emotional dimensions of organisational change and leadership are widely recognised in the leadership, organisational change and school improvement literature. However, the dissolution of the binary did not draw from feminist social theory, critical organisational theory, the sociology of emotions or critical pedagogy. Instead, the strongest influence in educational leadership and administration has been from psychological theory, management theory and brain science, mobilised particularly through Goleman's notion of emotional intelligence. This article undertakes a feminist deconstruction of two texts: one from organisational theory by Goleman and the other on educational leadership and school improvement, in order to explore how ‘emotion’ has been translated into educational leadership. As a counterpoint, I identify the gaps and silences, appropriations and marginalisation identified from feminist perspectives. I argue that the emotional labour of teaching and leading cannot be individualised because emotion is both relational and contextual.

The doctoral viva voce as a cultural practice: the gendered production of academic subjects

This article reports on a recent small‐scale phenomenological study into the student experience of the doctoral viva voce. It was prompted by strong concerns about viva voce processes on the part of a Director of Graduate Studies in an English university. The study involved semi‐structured interviews with 20 respondents from eight English universities in a range of disciplinary areas. An initial analysis of the interviews illuminated the powerful affective dimensions of the viva voce and the gendered nature of its processes. Resisting the binary separation of reason and emotion, the paper draws upon discursive theories of affect, gender and subjectivity to consider the affective economies that are illuminated in this data and suggests that this involves the reproduction of gendered hierarchies.

Communicating Biosecurity

Shifting from risk-calculation orientations focusing on populations to preparedness perspectives that model uncertainty through scenario-based projections, biosecurity debates redefined notions of “health” and “security.” Nevertheless, a key focus of biosecurity discussions—the domain labeled “communication”—has not been fundamentally rethought, even as it has expanded and professionalized. Bracketing preconceived ideas about the term's content, the article traces debates about biosecurity “communication” from the 1990s to the present, drawing on ethnography and textual analysis. Using a notion of biocommunicability, the cultural modeling of how discourse is produced, circulates, and is received, the article analyzes assumptions regarding subjects, subject-positions, objects, spatializing and temporalizing practices, scales, economies of affect, and regimes of ethics that are built into discourse about “communication.” Ironically, the conviction that “communication” is of marginal importance as a focus of critical inquiry, seemingly shared by most medical anthropologists, enables these assumptions to fundamentally shape discussions of biosecurity and emergency management.

Migration, Neoliberal Capitalism, and Islamic Reform in Kozhikode (Calicut), South India

AbstractThis article explores relationships between religious and economic practices in Kozhikode, a medium-sized city in Kerala. We examine debates concerning the apparent decline of the “bazaar economy” in the face of the onslaught of globalization and the consequent emergence of a “new economy.” The latter is felt locally to be overdetermined by capital and entrepreneurial practices connected, either directly or indirectly, to the combined effects of migration to the Gulf countries of West Asia and to the post-1991 liberalization of the Indian economy. We argue that these public debates are not simply reflections on the harsh reality of economic rationalization, but underscore the production and articulation of specific economies of morality and affect. We also perceive a drawing together of seemingly divergent orientations, sensibilities, and practices—namely, those commonly associated with reformist Islam and what in recent literature has been described as “neoliberal global capitalism.”

Webs of hate in diasporic cyberspaces: the Gaza War in the Russian-language blogosphere

This article looks at ways in which a military conflict can produce circuits of hatred in online social spaces. Ethnographically, the article is based on the analysis of selected discussions of Israeli warfare in Gaza in 2008 and 2009 as they took place in the Russian-language networked blogosphere. Bringing together Sara Ahmed’s notion of affective economies, Avtar Brah’s concept of ‘diaspora space’, Judith Butler’s idea of ‘frames of war’ and Eyal Weizman’s notion of ‘elastic frontiers’, the author addresses the disorienting similarity between anti-Jewish and anti-Arab hatred as it emerged in discussions of the conflict. The article examines online circulation of hatred as an integral part of cyber-diasporic connections and ruptures, on the one hand, and of digital circulation of affect, on the other.

Aesthetics, politics, identity: diasporic problematisations

In this article I examine the role of the aesthetic in the process of the reconfiguration of subjectivity and identity arising from displacement. I argue that the artwork in its various forms occupies a key place in that process, pointing out that it is the object both for expressing the dislocation of identity and for re-orienting affective energies towards new becomings. The wider analytical framework for this exploration of subjective change is the recognition that subjectivity is relational, embodied and metastable by reference to the material, discursive and psychological conditions that constitute it. I draw from postcolonial art and the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Bracha Ettinger and Bernard Stiegler to outline this approach, and develop arguments that establish the linkages between aesthetic practice, affective economy and the politics of change.

Teachers’ emotional experiences of growing diversity and multiculturalism in schools and the prospects of an ethic of discomfort

This article analyzes the ways in which emotions are constituted and mobilized by teachers to respond to growing diversity and multiculturalism in schools. The analysis is based on a two‐year ethnographic study conducted in three Greek‐Cypriot primary schools that are ‘multicultural’. The following focus questions are addressed: (1) How do teachers’ emotional experiences of growing diversity and multiculturalism in schools form particular economies of effect?; and (2) What is the nature of these economies of affect and in what ways is it possible to form an ethic of discomfort as a space for constructive transformations in multicultural schools? An ethic of discomfort is theorised as an economy of affect that uses discomfort as a point of departure for individual and social transformation. The outcomes of this study show that teachers experience intense emotional ambivalence in their efforts to cope with growing diversity and multiculturalism in schools. It is argued, however, that the capabilities of teachers to cope with growing diversity and multiculturalism are enhanced, if an ethic of discomfort is constituted in multicultural schools. The implications of this study are discussed in relation to teaching and teacher education and suggest that constituting an ethic of discomfort offers opportunities to challenge structures of power, privilege, racism, and oppression.

Synaptic Peacekeeping: Of Bipolar and Securitization

Recent years have seen a dramatic rise in statistical, professional, and popular accounts disorder/' yet, unlike in case other occasions distress and madness, few have discussed broader context in which these are enacted.1 Curious about this silence, in this essay I explore bodies and politics swirling in and through representations bipolar, in particular those produced by pharmaceutical industry Through these depictions I see bipolar, at once an official disorder and also an emerging trope, as a collaborative event in United States medication, whiteness, citizenship, and nation. It is one that creates a racialized, gendered figure control and balance while simultaneously generating (detaining, deporting) a manic Other. Already considered elsewhere as a gatekeeper medicalization (Conrad 2005) I come to contemplate pharmaceutical industry as also a vital element in securitization, and thus as perhaps an example what Jasbir Puar (2007) might call a contemporary war machine. Some Theory: The Bipolar Body Overall, as per Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987), this essay contributes to a decoding distress, madness, and use pharmaceuticals and thus moves toward what we might think as a more schizoanalytic contemplation peoples experiences as a collision bodies, technologies, histories, and power. Such an approach does not suggest that feelings fear, confusion, sadness, flatness, emptiness, loneliness, anxiousness, worthlessness, noisiness, agitation, stress, craziness, grandiosity, psychosis are not real, that any benefits one receives from pharmaceuticals are false, or that distress and madness are purely epistemologie al However, states that make up bipolar are part an embodied dialogue with world in which we live - our psyches/bodies/souls engaging in unique and dynamic ways with a maelstrom social, political, and corporate assemblages. Indeed, as public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation and the stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of (Stewart 2007, 2), distress and madness offer valuable sites to explore fleshy negotiation sociopolitics. Through dialectical engagement, is drawn into cultural narratives that transform, modulate, and twirl it into meanings and feelings, which in turn generate subjectivity It is this process subjectivization that renders as capacity, as a conduit becoming that is both unsettling and productive (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), while body itself is an that perpetually organizes subjective experiences via a sort affective economy (Blackman 2008). Thus, although in medical discourse bipolar is meant to infer a condition with a biological substrate, it follows that it can also be understood as a verb: it is not simply that we are or have bipolar, but rather that bipolar is a doing. The bipolar-body is enacting a cultural narrative, one that harnesses and spawns subjectivities. Yet this enactment is always uniquely situated in time and space; narrative itself is socially, historically, politically, and geographically contingent and constituted, while simultaneously landing in raced, classed, and gendered bodies. Moreover, given our current regime biomedicalization (Clarke et al. 2003), bipolar-body is a technoscientific accomplishment, a convergence technologies and corporeal working together to exile mania. I therefore also conceive bipolar-bodies as assemblages in and themselves, an event all these itinerant forces, in perpetual motion as they merge, submerge, (re) emerge. This foregrounding assemblage enables attention to ontology in tandem with epistemology and affect in conjunction with representational economies (Puar 2007, 204). Consequently, to explore rise in bipolar, in what follows I examine a component technological, discursive, and political passage (Blackman 2007) in and through which weaves, via an analysis pharmaceutical advertising. …

Racialization/ethnicization of school emotional spaces: the politics of resentment

The present article explores how emotional spaces are racialized and ethnicized in a multicultural elementary school in Cyprus through the majoritized group’s feelings of resentment. The data for this article are drawn from a two‐month ethnographic study at this school in which the students enrolled come from the two historically conflicting groups on the island, that is, Greek Cypriots (the majoritized group) and Turkish‐speaking students (the minoritized group). In light of the political problem in Cyprus and the ongoing conflict between these groups, the study investigates the emotions that Greek‐Cypriot students and teachers express about Turkish‐speaking children and the material implications of school policies and teachers’ practices on minoritized children’s lives. The study shows the ways in which the racialization/ethnicization of school emotional spaces contributes to the constitution of an affective economy of resentment towards Turkish‐speaking students and discusses how the emotional culture of resentment feeds school discourses, policies, and practices.

On Putting the Active Back into Activism

INTRODUCTION This paper addresses a paradox: how to engage in affirmative politics, which entails the production of social horizons of hope, while at the same time doing critical theory, which means resisting the present. This is one of the issues Deleuze and Guattari discuss at length, notably in What is Philosophy?: (1) the relationship between creativity and critique. It is however a problem that has confronted all activists and critical theorists, namely how to balance the creative potential of critical thought with the necessary dose of negative criticism and oppositional consciousness. Central to this debate is the question of how to resist the present, more specifically the nastiness, violence and vulgarity of the times, while being worthy of our times, so as to engage with the present in a productively oppositional and affirmative manner. I shall return to this in the final section of my essay. There is a conceptual and a contextual side to this problem and I want to start by discussing each one, before addressing my central concern. I. THE CONTEXT The public debate today shows a decline of interest in politics, whereas discourses about ethics, religious norms and values triumph. Some master-narratives circulate, which reiterate familiar themes: one is the inevitability of capitalist market economies as the historically dominant form of human progress. (2) Another is a contemporary brand of biological essentialism, under the cover of 'the selfish gene' (3) and new evolutionary psychology. Another resonant refrain is that God is not dead. Nietzsche's claim rings hollow across the spectrum of contemporary global politics, dominated by the clash of civilizations and widespread Islam phobia. The bio-political concerns that fuel our necro-politics and the perennial warfare of our times also introduce a political economy of negative passions in our social context. Thus the affective economy expresses our actual condition: we now live in a militarised social space, under the pressure of increased enforcement of security and escalating states of emergency. The binary oppositions of the Cold War era have been replaced by the all-pervasive paranoia: the constant threat of the imminent disaster. From the environmental catastrophe to the terrorist attack, accidents are imminent and certain to materialise: it is only a question of time. In this context, mass political activism has been replaced by rituals of public collective mourning. Melancholia has become a dominant mood and a mode of relation. There is, of course, much to be mournful about, given the pathos of our global politics: our social horizon is war-ridden and death-bound. We live in a culture where religious-minded people kill in the name of 'the Right to Life' and wage war for 'Humanitarian' reasons. Depression and burn-out are major features of our societies. Psych-pharmaceutical management of the population results in widespread use of legal and illegal drugs. The narcotic sub-text of our societies is under-studied and mostly denied. Bodily vulnerability is increased by the great epidemics: some new ones, like HIV, Ebola, SARS or the bird flu; others more traditional, like TB and malaria. Health has become more than a public policy issue: it is a human rights and a national defence concern. While new age remedies and life-long coaching of all sorts proliferate, our political sensibility has taken a forensic shift: 'bare life', as Agamben argues, (4) marks the liminal grounds of probable destitution--infinite degrees of dying. At the same time European culture is obsessed with youth and longevity, as testified by the popularity of anti-ageing treatments and plastic surgery. Hal Foster (5) describes our schizoid cultural politics as 'traumatic realism'--an obsession with wounds, pain and suffering. Proliferating medical panopticons produce a global patho-graphy: (6) we go on television talk-shows to scream our pain. …

Just Another Night in the Shooting Gallery?: The Syringe, Space, and Affect

In his ethnography of the shooting gallery Phillipe Bourgois interprets the comment “I started shooting heroin at 14, now I'm 64” as an indication that his respondent's “oppression is fully internalised and, almost like a neo-liberal ideologue, he takes full responsibility for his poverty, illiteracy and homelessness” (1998 Theory, Culture and Society 15). In this paper I consider whether this interpretation adequately gets to grips with a lifetime of attachment to the syringe. Could there be another interpretation for the experience of the shooting gallery? What happens when heroin addiction is addressed not in terms of the political economy of suffering but the political economy of affect? Drawing on my empirical research on the syringe, I examine the affective dimension of the shooting gallery, paying particular attention to the sensation of the syringe. My focus concerns the policy of needle exchange, practices of syringe collection and disposal, and issues of space, waste, and affect. Bringing together poststructural analyses of space, I argue that the excess value of the used syringe unsettles the boundaries between subject and object, private and public, and space and place. This has implications for how we understand not just the space of the shooting gallery but the politics of harm reduction and the city.

Funcionamento psíquico e manejo clínico de pacientes somáticos: reflexões a partir da noção de desafetação

O presente estudo tem como objetivo apresentar um panorama, em termos teóricos e clínicos, da concepção psicossomática de Joyce McDougall. A noção de desafetação será utilizada como operador conceitual básico. Trata-se de um distúrbio da economia afetiva típico de pacientes somáticos, o qual promove uma incapacidade quase total em manter contato com as emoções próprias e alheias. Dentre outras especificidades da clínica psicanalítica com pacientes somáticos, destaca-se que ao profissional será imposto o desafio de funcionar como um filtro - sendo, assim, capaz de regular o afluxo de excitações, que tende a desencadear descargas corporais em função da inviabilidade, associada à desafetação, e de recorrer às palavras para torná-lo dizível.

Anti-apartheid boycotts and the affective economies of struggle: the case of Aotearoa New Zealand1

One of the major manifestations of sport-centred activist political struggles in the latter half of the twentieth century centred on the demand for the sporting and broader cultural, social, economic and political isolation of South Africa during the apartheid era. The struggle saw apartheid-endorsed South African sports organizations expelled from international bodies beginning in the 1950s, with the South African National Olympic Committee being the only one ever to be expelled from the IOC. The sports boycott was one of the major successes of the international anti-apartheid campaign, yet the existing literature on boycotts is only marginally relevant to cultural (including sports) boycotts. Furthermore, the existing literature dealing with sports boycotts, with its focus on the multilateral politics of Olympic boycotts, is of minimal use in explaining mass activist campaigns such as the anti-apartheid movement. This essay centres on the campaign against the 1981 South African rugby tour of Aotearoa New Zealand to explore the multiple significances of sport in the target (South Africa) and sender (Aotearoa New Zealand) states, and the character of the mass movement to argue that the cultural significance of both sport and the politics of ‘race’ and colonialism are vital to an effective understanding of mass movement supported bilateral cultural boycotts.