Affective Economy Research Articles

Unemployment in the Affective Economy: Exploring the Affective Governing of Young Unemployed People in the Danish Welfare State

Abstract This case study investigates the affective governing of young unemployed people, and it concludes that getting money in the Danish welfare state comes with an “affective price”. In the quest for a job, unemployed people have been increasingly responsibilized in order to live up to the ideal of the active jobseeker. Consequently, when faced with unemployment, they are encouraged to work harder on themselves and their motivation. Based on an interview study with young unemployed people (N=39) and field observations made at employment fund agencies in Denmark (2014–15), I explore how young unemployed people are governed by and through their emotions. By supplementing governmentality studies (Foucault et al. 1988, 2010) with the concept of “affective economy” from Ahmed (2014), I discuss how young unemployed people who receive money from the Danish state are placed in a situation of debt. The paper unfolds how this debt becomes visible as the unemployed people often describe feeling under suspicion for not doing enough, for not being motivated enough. Through an abundance of (pro) activity, they have to prove the suspicion of being lazy wrong, and through managing themselves as active jobseekers, they earn the right to get money from the state. Here motivation, passion and empowerment are key currencies. I discuss the intricate interplay between monetary and affective currencies as well as political implications in the context of the Danish welfare. The article contributes by making visible the importance of taking affective matters into account when investigating the complex relationship between politics and psychology.

Affect and its Circulation in and Beyond Richard Selzer's “Imelda”

Abstract Appreciation and literary representation of affective responses in medical encounters help resist the reductionist temptation to quantify and simplify illness experience with test data, images, and medical jargon. Then how do these representations of affect make a difference in the medical profession? Surgeon writer Richard Selzer's short story “Imelda” (1982) might offer a unique perspective to examine physicians' affective engagements with illness experience and illuminate how literature works through the representation of affect in medical contexts. In light of Sarah Ahmed's ideas of circulation in affective economies and the forming of affective communities, I read Imelda's deformity and the narrative as two affect objects which trigger the circulation of affect and the formation of a transformative network of affect among all those who are involved in the dramatic event of a post mortem operation. I argue that the emergence of affect in medical encounters energizes literary representation, while literature captures affect with language, and animates affective circulation in and beyond the narrative. More importantly, affective circulation occasioned by physician writing brings in new possibilities to humanize medicine.

Persian Literature and Modernity: Production and Reception

Persian Literature and Modernity: Production and Reception

Contextualizing Replay: Remediation, Affective Economies, Ontological Authority, and the Facade of Certitude

This study contextualizes replay within the discourse of sport media. Drawing on discourse as theory, the author articulates how replay functions within the sportscast as adjudication, arguably the most compelling yet contentious aspect of the live sportscast. Not only does replay function within sport media discourse, but it also operates within a broader cultural context. Given sport media’s key locus within the entertainment industry, the use of replay is a key technological innovation that has brought even more consolidation and coordination between sport media and the sport leagues and organizations. Replay is media’s contribution to maintaining the veneer of integrity through a quest for certitude. As an analytical strategy, the intertextuality of replay provides an opportunity to interrogate whose interests are being served and consolidated in the mobilization of this technology within affective economies that satisfy a neoliberal sensibility.

The Gender Politics of Viraha:

Viraha in high literature is constituted on the idea of separation, or “loss,” the pining to get back to the primordial relationship with the supreme. This sacred “emotion” is operationalized through de-transcendentalization of divinity in a novel affective economy in both Bhakti and Sufi traditions. Though this new devotional sect sets forth a direct communion with the divine, the absolute other, the mainstream Bhakti traditions introduce the symbol of Radha and the High Sufi theology envisions an ideal Beauty realized in the body of the unique Woman as the medium or intermediary to the path of attaining the divine. This female other is considered to be the source of psycho-sexual plenitude necessary for the experience of union with the divine. Alongside this proposition, the new norm gets new dimension with the feminization of worship, i.e., the male devotee taking up the role of the female. Thus, the gendered phenomena takes on a new impetus in this mode of expression characterized as the female voice. Such an inversion of gender envisages a new Female Body which obliterates the flesh-bodied woman. Through a new presence, woman becomes absent in this symbolism through denial of their sexual difference.

In Pursuit of Masculinity

Abstract In this article, I describe the roles played by society and individual life-history on the aging process of a South Asian artist in Europe. Using participant observation and the life-history method, I look at my informant's emotional practices of aging. The resultant case study delineates his emotional pursuits and his views on what it means to be a man in his early sixties. I start by reviewing anthropological critiques of many of the current taken-for-granted gendered and biomedical conceptions of the aging body. Thereafter, I try to add to the debate surrounding these conceptions by looking into the affective economy of aging that my informant is embedded in. The article is as such an effort to understand the role that affect and emotional practices play in youthful ideals and self-conceptualizations of aging and masculinity.

Towards a Theory of Posthuman Care: Real Humans and Caring Robots

This essay interrogates the common assumption that good care is necessarily human care. It looks to disruptive fictional representations of robot care to assist its development of a theory of posthuman care that jettisons the implied anthropocentrism of ethics of care philosophy but retains care’s foregrounding of entanglement, embodiment and obligation. The essay reads speculative representations of robot care, particularly the Swedish television programme Äkta människor ( Real Humans), alongside ethics of care philosophy and critical posthumanism to highlight their synergetic critiques of neoliberal affective economies and humanist hierarchies that treat some bodies and affects as more real than others. These texts and discourses assist me in proposing a theory of care that regards vulnerability as the normative effect of posthuman vital embodiment, as opposed to an anomalous state that can be overcome or corrected via neoliberal practice.

The labor of consent: affect, agency and whiteness in the age of #metoo

ABSTRACT Using the New Yorker story Cat Person, and the babe.net story I went on a date with Aziz Ansari, it turned into the worst night of my life, we explore the possibilities of consent in a context of gender inequality and white supremacy, where women’s physical safety is in danger when in the presence of men, where men have significantly more cultural capital and privilege than women, where white women most easily access narratives about agency and violability, and where the emotional labor in heterosexual relationships falls on women. The article argues for the importance of seeing consent as part of an affective economy, rather than a simple matter of choice and agency, and insists on a contextualizing of consent in the #metoo movement that is attentive to the cultural logics of patriarchy and whiteness.

Digital media and the affective economies of transnational families

Digital media are widely recognised as essential to the maintenance of transnational families. To date, most accounts have focused on the role of digital media practices as producing and sustaining transnational relationships, through, for example, the practices of ‘digital kinning’. In this article, we extend that body of work by drawing attention to the specific role of the emotions that are circulated through digital media interactions and practices. We use data from ethnographic interviews with older migrant adults to consider how people who fled civil wars and resettled in Australia bridge the distances between ‘here’ and ‘there’. Our analysis draws attention to the circulation of affect, arguing that it is the capacity of digital media to circulate emotions and support affective economies that gives substance to and defines the surfaces and boundaries of transnational families, and constitutes the mutuality of being that underpins familyhood at a distance.

Migrant platformed subjectivity: Rethinking the mediation of transnational affective economies via digital connectivity services

This article investigates how commercial and government-based sectors in the Philippines deploy emotive mechanisms to promote the importance of connectivity services in addressing the affective and transnational needs of overseas Filipinos. By combining a walkthrough method with critical discourse analysis, the study compares and contrasts the interface, operating model and mode of governance of three selected case studies in the Philippines: Western Union, LBC Express Inc. and BaLinkBayan. The findings reveal that the emotionalising techniques of connectivity services construct what we call ‘platformed migrant subjectivity’. This conception articulates migrants as economic subjects and valued clientele within the commercial infrastructures and operations of an online platform. In sum, this article takes a nuanced approach to examine how commercial and government institutions utilise online platforms in mobilising emotional, transnational and digital transactions, which may redefine a migrant’s subjectivity, mobility and citizenship in a digital era.

The affective assemblage of internationalisation in Japanese higher education

Positive attributes stick to higher education internationalisation, and it is a policy paradigm with performative effects. Internationalisation draws on imagined virtuous flows of knowledge production and exchange, and is presented as an assemblage of detraditionalisation, expansiveness and epistemic and cultural opportunity for individuals, organisations and nation states. Policies target bodies, minds and affect, yet are presented as an unquestionable good in an imagined genderneutral, borderless, meritocratic and benign global knowledge economy. This paper explores the affective economy of internationalisation drawing upon interview data gathered in fifteen private, five national and eight public universities in Japan with thirty-four migrant academics and thirteen international doctoral researchers. We aim to contribute to internationalisation theory by exploring the sticky micropolitics of internationalisation in relation to affective assemblages, and how the gendered, racialised, linguistic and epistemic inequalities constituting academic mobility are frequently disqualified from discourse. Our discussion includes consideration of the Japanese policy context, the concept of affective assemblages, navigating gender regimes, precarity and linguistic imperialism. We conclude that the immaterial or affective labour that is required to unstick, install and maintain an internationalised academic identity and navigate the translations and antagonisms from everyday encounters with difference is substantially under-estimated.

Racialized Affectivities of (Un)Belonging: Mixed (Race) Couples in the Shadow of Brexit

This paper explores the affective economy of (un)belonging, revealed by the UK decision to withdraw from the European Union (EU). Emerging social science research on so-called ‘Brexit’ focuses on the anticipated effects of a stricter UK immigration regime on the lives of EU citizens and families. Against the background of the country’s postcolonial melancholia, and drawing from my ethnographic fieldwork in England (2018–2019), this paper discusses how British and mixed-migration status, mixed (race) couples narrate the impact of the poll’s outcome on their affective orientations towards the UK and the EU. It shows how race inflects partners’ different perception of Brexit as a historical rupture or as an event in a continuum; as a loss of entitlement to mobility in space, or of the legitimacy of permanence in place; as a lingering danger, or a magnifier of existing patterns of violence. By putting Black and mixed-race partners’ narratives center stage, this paper traces three scenes of expression of their perceived contested and precarious belonging: the ordinariness of racism in the UK, the mistrust in the durability of the boundaries of inclusion drawn by the British state, and a heightened alertness for fear of escalating racist and homophobic violence.

Shifting women: Mobilizing intimate kinship in a Punjabi diaspora domestic narrative

Based on extensive multi-site fieldwork with Punjabi immigrants in Italy, the article discusses the institute of transnational marriage and kin reunification among Indian diasporas, interlacing the drive for upward mobility, the normative frame of family migration and the affective economy in building affinity relations. A household case is considered: the lag between a mother’s and her daughter’s experience, an Indian pioneer migrant and a 2nd generation Italian, who differently resorted to kin networks and practices of intimacy in order to circumvent contingent burdens such as political persecution, economic uncertainty, law-enforced stuckedness. The dissonant genealogical narrative that this mother-daughter dyad share sheds light on gender and age intersections in transnational migrations, revealing how a migrant life-course is embedded in family and social upheavals that unfold across different historical challenges. The role of kinship and the alternative dependencies or opportunities it may yield are gauged against a frame of structural constraints and novel desires for making one’s living in a world increasingly hostile but not impermeable to mobility.

Feeling Environmental Policing: Possibilities and Challenges for Socio-Ecological Justice.

This is a conceptual paper that merges collaborative acts of storying with theoretical contributions from the affective turn (Clough, 2008) to illustrate ways by which mainstream forms of environmentalism (Klein, 2015) may inscribe normative ways of feeling and being with environments while policing others. Methodologically, we draw on our personal and collective storying-while-walking (Springgay & Truman, 2019) in and around the University of British Columbia (UBC) during the Canadian Society for the Study of Education 2019 conference. We consider how our encounters with/in nature are often disciplined by popular environmentalist discourses (e.g., recycling, greening, contaminating). In our walks/storying, we centre material agents (e.g., trash receptacles, kombucha bottle, tree) as part of affective economies (Ahmed, 2013) that align us to particular ways of feeling (with) nature, for example, embarrassment from not knowing how to recycle a kombucha bottle. We attune ourselves to this hegemonic environmental imaginary, in which certain humans assume control and dominion over nature and reinforce that control via green economies. This compels us to ask: in what ways do environmental efforts for cultivating more response-ability towards nature (Wallace, Higgins & Bazzul, 2018) come to exceed our response-ability with each other as part of nature? How might we follow affective economies that discipline how we value, manage and save nature, and how might this open up pedagogical possibilities for relating differently with each other/nature? With science and environmental education and research in mind, we suggest staying with emotions that make visible acts of environmental policing for socio-ecological justice.

Towards a queer affective economy of boys’ love in contemporary Chinese media

ABSTRACT This article expands the existing research on the boys’ love (BL) cultural phenomenon by analysing two popular BL films, A Round Trip to Love and Uncontrolled Love, and one TV series, Addicted, all streamed online in 2016. Previous research has explored the various aspects of BL such as cultural globalization from below, the online publishing industry and censorship, and the theme of incest and queer sexuality. This article turns a greater attention to the dialectical relationship between affect, queer desire and neoliberalism by unpacking further the affective work that BL performs in contemporary China. BL is both structurally constrained by the economic infrastructure of heteronormative kinship norms in neoliberal China and residual forms of socialism, as well as offering alternative modality of affective tendency that exceeds these structural impediments. Conceptually, this research explicates three forms of affective work in BL in contemporary China, namely affective imprisonment, queer affective reparation and affective overcoming, in order to illuminate the relationship between affect, queer desire and neoliberalism in contemporary China.

Public Emotions and Variations of Violence: Evidence from Colombia

In 2010 Colombia experienced an unexpected surge in acid attacks against women, and from 2010–2014, it had more acid attacks per capita than any other country in the world. No other form of violent crime in the country demonstrated such a spike. What explains this unusual variation in violence? I argue that this unique pattern of violence was made sensible by the 2005–2011 nation-building campaignColombia Is Passionthat redefined the enduring violence plaguing the country as men’s misunderstood passion for beautiful women. By valorizing violence toward women and making women’s membership in the nation contingent upon their beauty, the campaign created an affective economy under which acid attacks became both intelligible and effective in producing social death and national ostracization. In this paper, I have denaturalized violence against women and suggest that political scientists might do more to explain important variations of violence outside of armed conflict. Finally, I demonstrate the explanatory power of interpretive studies of political culture, national identity, and public emotion in structuring the meaning and patterns of violence.

SYMBIOTIC ILLUSION AND FEMALE IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION IN EATING DISORDERS: A PSYCHOANALYTICAL PSYCHOSOMATICS’ PERSPECTIVE

Abstract: This study aims primarily to reflect on the role of symbiotic illusion in the construction of female identity in women with eating disorders (ED), using premises from psychoanalytic psychosomatics. Considering ED as psychopathologies related to the affective economy, Oedipal relations play crucial role in the process of identity constitution. Mother-daughter relationships in ED are shaped in the molds of symbiotic illusion, with weak father figures. We presented a case study to briefly illustrate the theoretical framework. The omissive posture of a father to interdict the symbiotic relation leads daughters to find themselves unable to libidinally invest in other objects.

Feminist Blind Spots and the Affect of Secularity: Disorienting the Discourse of the Veil in Contemporary Morocco

Based on extensive fieldwork with founding members of the Moroccan feminist movement who come out of a leftist political tradition, this article provides an ethnography of leftist feminist aversion toward the hijab (modern headscarf) in contemporary Morocco. I situate the preoccupation with the hijab among Moroccan secular feminists within a broader affective economy and civilizational discourse about the veil that contributes to its intensity and tenacity. I argue that this incitement to discourse about the hijab conscripts Moroccan secular-leftist feminists into a global moral panic that prevents them from engaging with veiled and nonsecular women on their own (diverse) terms or being in solidarity with them. It also keeps them conveniently invested in the Orientalist idea that feminism in places like Morocco requires vigilance against the threat of religion and tradition rather than the conscripting logics of colonialism, capitalism, and neoliberalism. In doing so, I suggest that the discourse of the veil not only perpetuates notions of Western superiority and makes lives less livable for Muslim minorities in the West, it also keeps postcolonial feminists embroiled in the Western battle of the veil and estranged from each other.

Promoting ‘pro’, ‘low’, and ‘no’ meat consumption in Switzerland: The role of emotions in practices

Meat consumption has become a contentious issue among the Swiss population. The emotional character of the debates surrounding the necessity for a change of habits, namely a reduction in consumption and a shift in the kind of meat we eat, reveals its particular place in our societies: as a symbolic food with roots in our affective economies, as involved in the creation of a shared culture and national identity, and as a political object used to defend different views. To date, research in sustainable consumption has given much attention to environmental- and animal-friendly groups and their practices. However, certain interest groups have been voicing the right to meat, or promoting alternative forms of meat consumption. In this paper, we seek to understand the affective dimension of ‘no’, ‘low’ and ‘pro’ meat consumption initiatives in the Swiss context. Based on a qualitative study and an understanding of emotions as part of social practices, we draw out what affects and related moralities are being mobilized by prescribers and how they are picked up in practice. By doing so, we contribute to further understanding the emotions and moral registers linked to different approaches to meat (non)consumption, their role in promoting certain practices over others, as well as the dynamics that make reducing meat consumption so controversial. We conclude by discussing the need to take emotions and related moralities seriously as a crucial step towards understanding opportunities for ‘healthy and sustainable’ food practices.

“That’s Obviously Really Insensitive:” Attuning to Marginalization in a Parent-Teacher Encounter

This paper draws on Ahmed’s construct of affective economies to explore the role of affect in explaining how marginalization becomes (re)produced in pre-service teachers’ encounters with an actor playing a Kurdish refugee mother in a simulated parent-teacher conference. Through an interpretive case study of four matched-pair pre-service teachers, this paper argues that affective explanations can complement an ideological perspective on marginalization. It does so by attending to the systemic production of marginalization and to the historicized selves and attunements of both pre-service teachers and the actor, and by illustrating the opportunities afforded for reproduction or resistance in particular encounters. The affective approach offers alternate entry points for teacher educators interested in the development of justice-oriented pre-service teachers.