Lauren Berlant Research Articles

“What truth are you telling me about?”

This article discusses two Belarusian music videos from 2020, “Shchuchynshchyna” and “Ne Smeshno” (“Not Funny”), both of which were framed by their creators as commentary on the 2020 protests. In “Ne Smeshno,” band Molchat Doma seemingly attempts to wake a city stricken by an epidemic of sleep—and fails, with one exception. The parody video “Shchuchynshchyna” debuted in a satirical web series, where Elena ZheludOk’s performance of state-approved pop entrances a rebellious rock guitarist. I discuss these videos through Almira Ousmanova’s work on defamiliarization in Belarusian art and politics and through Lauren Berlant’s thought on the allegory. I argue that both videos engage with the idea that art’s political potential is in its power to undermine the state’s hegemonic version of reality. However, in both videos, this break in perception is a secondary effect of music, a consequence of the new gendered, intimate relations that music directly sets in motion.

From Fear and Anxiety to Vulnerable Collective Action: Lucy Kirkwood's The Children

In a seemingly tranquil cottage along the coast, Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children (2016) delves into the profound anxieties and vulnerabilities arising from an ecological crisis. Set in a post-nuclear disaster Britain, the play follows three retired nuclear scientists grappling with the consequences of their past decisions. Amidst a world in chaos, Kirkwood portrays the fragile relationships and emotional struggles of her characters, reflecting the anxieties prevalent in our own reality. Drawing on affect studies theories—such as Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism” and “inconvenience,” Sianne Ngai’s “ugly feelings” and Clare Hemmings’ “affective dissonance”—this analysis explores how these concepts shed light on the characters’ experiences. Berlant’s ideas help us understand the characters’ necessity to adhere to routine as a means to avoid confronting larger, more pressing issues. Ngai’s “ugly feelings” expose the anxiety and discomfort that pervade their lives, while Hemmings’ “affective dissonance” highlights the internal conflicts and moral dilemmas they face. By emphasising these struggles, the play invites audiences to reflect on their own vulnerabilities and consider the need for collective action in the face of adversity. Deliberately refusing catharsis, the play underscores the persistence of unresolved crises, prompting viewers to engage with the issues presented on stage and consider their implications beyond the theatre.

(Re) framing the politics of climate change: resilience, reparative critique and affective life in situations of extreme heat

ABSTRACT One of the ways we know climate change is through the emergencies that make it present. But how does the connection between singular events (emergencies) and a meta-stable condition (climate change) become perceivable to us? Through what knowledges? And with what political implications? In this paper I apply these questions to deepen critical understanding of government-orchestrated efforts to enhance climate resilience. Pursuing an alternative pathway to critiques that reduce resilience to neoliberalism, I bring resilience into dialogue with Lauren Berlant’s concept of situations. The importance of situations rests in its ability to diversify our understanding of the emergencies to which resilience responds. Initially, situations prompt us to explore emergencies fundamentally as ruptures in people’s ongoing affective encounter with the world. They also capture how our experience of emergencies is colored by the broader historical significance they hold as critical events that change collective life. And, as with all events read through affect, situations are also an object of mediation. Thinking with situations, I demonstrate how, through resilience, government actors mediate our sense of the relationship between emergencies, on one hand, and climate change as an epochal condition, on the other. By distributing responsibility, resilience allows a wide catalogue of voices to influence common perceptions of this relationship and, consequently, evidences potential to integrate what Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick calls reparative critique into climate consciousness by highlighting the ramifications climate-related emergencies have on specific communities because of environmental harms visited upon them over time and orienting future action towards attending to these harms. I make this argument through research into the US’ Environmental Protection Agency’s attempts to raise situational awareness of extreme heat risk. While seeking to mobilize people’s embodied knowledges in sensing imminent danger, these practices push concurrently for understanding, and acting upon, climate change vulnerability by its entanglement with violent processes that underpinned the modernization projects fundamental to American life now.

Oppositional Defiant Disorder or Contrarian Speech? The Terrific Murder of (S)Jack the Elephant

This essay explores the concept of ‘contrarianism’ in its polymorphic nature. The figure of the ‘contrarian’ is likened to Janus, simultaneously challenging and benefiting from existing power structures. The essay examines the persistent stigmatization of individuals who learn to live with debilitating somatic illnesses and the discrimination against those with psychogenic bodies, interpreting them as manifestations of contrarianism. It considers how reactions such as culturally inappropriate responses to stressors, socially deviant behaviour and conflicts between individuals and society can be viewed as attempts to challenge prevailing modes of coexistence. Drawing on the works of Roland Barthes and Lauren Berlant, this essay proposes contrarianism as a multifaceted exploration of non-stigmatized ways of leading an ‘idiorhythmic’ life.

Poetic scenes of prenatal screening

ABSTRACT Every day a patient’s pocket becomes 425 dollars lighter for clinicians to guide and provide non-invasive prenatal testing. This research inquires: what are clinicians’ experiences of explaining prenatal screening and delivering genetic syndrome diagnoses? This paper Departs Radically in Academic Writing (DRAW) and presents key findings from qualitative interviews with 12 clinicians in “poetic scenes”, inspired by cultural theorist Lauren Berlant and anthropologist Kathleen Stewart. I describe DRAW, the birth story of a research rationale, and my metaphorical meeting with Berlant and Stewart. Then the poetic scenes begin: we enter doctors’ offices and bump into assumptions; we become a time-poor clinician, labouring in language construction with varying degrees of consciousness; we dissect “risk” – an ambiguous specimen; and we board the wrong train, going to prenatal screening destinations that we don’t like to name. We imagine a world where prenatal screening is built with poetry. We dream of attention to words.

Inconvenience and Its Sisters: Lauren Berlant's Last Affective Meditation

Abstract: The Inconvenience of Other People describes how inconvenience may appear a minor affective experience, but it is actually a mode of relationality that governs our lives. This essay takes Lauren Berlant's primary analytic mode—the case study—and applies the lessons of Inconvenience to the films R.M.N . and Promising Young Woman to explore how sexual violence constitutes both an object in itself and an entry point into other ways in which affect can disrupt the naturalization of inequality. Both films frame the conditions under which inconvenience become an event and a major force in our lives that helps us grasp what we owe each other and ourselves.

Berlant's America

Abstract: Lauren Berlant's work is well-known for its fine-grained analyses of ambivalent emotions, complex affective conditions, and contradictory political states. This essay argues that in Berlant's writing we can also discern revolutionary political desire, often expressed indirectly, as if refracted through the prism of our present social condition. He offers a reading of the film Born in Flames as an example of the kind of revolutionary desire he finds in Berlant's work.

Facing the Drive: Berlant, Freud, Non/Sovereignty

Abstract: "Facing the Drive: Berlant, Freud, (Non)Sovereignty" reads Lauren Berlant's On the Inconvenience of Other People as a revisionary response to Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle . Despite Berlant's explicit argument for the necessary dissolution of sovereign fantasy, Edelman argues that the fantasy of sovereignty returns in the text's inability to face the destitutions of the drive. Tracing the contradictions engendered by the Berlant's attempt to put the "inconvenience drive" in the service of a politicized affect theory, this essay examines how the negativity Berlant wants to qualify, or refute, returns in the tensions that open up between political decision and (non)sovereignty.

(Care)fully reconstituting cruel professionalism with and for early childhood educators: how caring activism can resist uncaring conditions

ABSTRACT As a patriarchal and neoliberal construct, professionalism actively contorts the embodied care work of this femme profession into a predetermined frame, fragmenting, constricting, and harming educators’ identities. In this paper, we briefly outline the ongoing project of professionalism both in the ECEC sector broadly and in the unique context of Ontario, Canada. Taking up Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism, we assert that professionalism in ECEC is cruel. We situate our example of cruel professionalism within the Ontario, Canada context and take up the Association of Early Childhood Educators Ontario’s (AECEO) grassroots community-building work grounded in feminist ethics of care and the idea of caring activism to subvert this cruelty. We do this by centering the voices and lived experiences of ECEs working in a marginalized corner of the ECEC sector who are also active members of a grassroots advocacy community of practice (CoP) associated with the AECEO. Through their narratives the cruelty of professionalism is exposed, and the collective improvisation of caring activism amongst ECEs is revealed. We conclude by offering a caring optimism as a proposition and an open question for redefining and reconstituting what it means to be a professional ECE.

À Plein Temps (Full Time, 2021): On the Inconvenience of Other People’s Strikes

This paper situates Éric Gravel’s 2021 feature film À plein temps at a hinge point between the “cinema of precarity” and something new. Building on Lauren Berlant’s (2022) conceptualisation of inconvenience, I argue that the film’s depiction of strike action as inconvenient is precisely what allows it to portray and comment on an emergent post-neoliberal structure of feeling in France and beyond.

Crisis and critique in Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind (2021)

ABSTRACT To date, literary fiction’s interventions into debates about the crisis in literary studies, and contestations over critical methods, have received scant scholarly attention. Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind treats the idea of crisis with irony, utilising overstatement in the novel’s narrative discourse to draw attention to crisis discourse’s inefficacy in delivering meaningful change. The novel represents literary critique, especially as extended to non-literary objects, as a compulsion; and, as failing to result in action. Instead, in The Life of the Mind, crisis and critique are discursive conventions which culminate in the protagonist remaining in a suspended emotional and economic state. This paper draws its theoretical approach from the novel’s intertexts, including Lauren Berlant’s conceptions of crisis ordinariness and impasse, and contextualises The Life of the Mind in relation to its intervention into discussions about critique and reading methodologies. Literary criticism and literary fiction are portrayed as being in a state of impasse in Smallwood’s novel. Despite Berlant’s (and Ann Cvetkovich’s) guarded sense of impasse as a state of potential, in The Life of the Mind impasse is regarded ironically; progress in the protagonist’s situation, in the discipline of literary studies, and in the practice of critique, are questionable.

Indebtpending: an ugly feeling of youthful financialised futurity

ABSTRACT ‘The future’ is a key object of concern in youth studies and sociology more generally. With the recent rise of the financialisation of everyday life and the consumption of credit, young people’s futures are concomitantly financialised. Our research with young people in Australia discussing their experiences of debt and their financial practices shows how these navigations have implications for how they imagine their own futures. Drawing upon Sianne Ngai’s theorisation of ‘ugly feelings’ and Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism, we propose the term ‘indebtpending’ to conceptualise how financialisation processes affect and mediate young people’s orientations towards the future. Indebtpending includes ‘in debt’, ‘independence’ and ‘pending’ as elements that work together to create an array of temporal-related feelings towards how aspirations and life plans may play out, some of which feel like aspects of ‘adulthood’ are being foreclosed. Indebtpending is therefore an affective state of youthful imagining where being in debt is a necessity of late capitalism.

Youthful ambivalence towards a good life: rhetorical anxieties as affective vacillations in Hegang

ABSTRACT This study revisits the concept of anxiety and affective dimensions through an analysis of social media related to affordable housing property in Hegang, a small city located in the northeastern part of China. We build on Calum Matheson’s reconceptualization of anxiety as arising from networks of affective investment along with Sara Ahmed’s concept of the sociality of emotions and Lauren Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism. The essay sees rhetorical anxieties as affective vacillations from constant adaptions to an impasse caused by the polarizing effect of a rising neoliberal order, manifested as shifted orientations toward objects of desire and happiness. Constant vacillations may lead to a state of restlessness where anxiety is sedimented to routines and thus recedes to the background, making anxiety ambivalent in shape and unpredictable in trajectory. Viewing rhetorical anxieties as affective vacillations offers insights into their manifestations as anxious encounters and constant affective (re)investments. This reimagination of anxiety has implications on both theoretical inquiries of rhetorical anxieties as affects and practical understandings of the rise of the recent youth counternarratives in China.

Sufficient Tragedy: Masculinity as Cruel Optimism in Beowulf

ABSTRACT This article offers a new framework for approaching masculinity in Beowulf by suggesting that masculinity is dependent upon what affect theorist Lauren Berlant (2011) calls “cruel optimism”: when an individual pursues something that is an obstacle to their flourishing. This article traces how Beowulf constructs a “masculine economy” sustained by a cruel optimistic attachment to an ideal and unobtainable masculinity, taking the flyting contest between Unferð and Beowulf (ll. 499–558) as an illustrative example of how homosocial competitions that promise masculinity are just as likely to unravel it. This article then examines Beowulf’s defeat and death (ll. 2711b–2820), to demonstrate that failure is intrinsic to cruel optimism. By examining the subversive possibilities of what Jack Halberstam calls “queer failure”, this reading raises questions about whether Beowulf the poem criticises and Beowulf the man refuses the cruelty of masculine striving.

Paradise Lost? Sex, Negativity and Toxic Symbiosis in Ulrich Seidl’s Paradies: Liebe and Paradies: Glaube

This article leans on the dialogic exchange between Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman in Sex, or the Unbearable (2013) as a theoretical springboard for a reading of two of Ulrich Seidl’s Paradies trilogy films — Paradies: Liebe (2012) and Paradies: Glaube (2012) — to consider the role sex plays as a site of relationality in both. In connecting sex and the unbearable, Berlant and Edelman suggest that sex has both anchoring and disrupting properties. Bearing this duality in mind, I focus on the two middle-aged, female protagonists we encounter in the films, respectively a sex tourist and a sexually repressed Catholic proselytizer. I propose that through their experiences the films stage encounters with the unbearable. However, the unbearable is not connected to the depiction of sex per se; rather, it emerges from the various relational bonds between the protagonists. Advancing the notion of toxic symbiosis, I argue that relationality in Seidl’s films is ambiguous: it can be beneficial for the characters and yet it is also a sign of their exploitation. Relationality thus troubles the reproduction of a social order that is steeped in a normative understanding of (corporeal) relations as constructive, supportive and worthwhile. Sex in Seidl’s films is divorced from hegemonic meaning-making, underscoring resistance to totality, independence and control in scenes of relationality.

Relationality and Lateral Agency in Herta Müller’s Reisende auf einem bein and Lutz Seiler’s Stern 111

Irene, the protagonist in Herta Müller’s Reisende auf einem Bein (1989), experiences her flight from Eastern European communism to the capitalist West as a continuous journey which also extends into her everyday life in West Berlin after her arrival. She finds herself suspended in a moment of halting transition, characterized by a sense of stasis rather than the vision of a better future. The latter also applies to Carl, the main character of Lutz Seiler’s novel Stern 111 (2020), when he lives through the ‘Wendezeit’ after the fall of the Wall in Gera and Berlin-Mitte. However, both texts also create poetic forms of lateral agency, with the potential of change. These include different forms of physical movement, giving the protagonists access to encounters and perceptions that deviate from familiar social patterns, thus allowing for new foci of interaction and potentially enabling new relational networks and forms of interaction. In my contribution I will compare the journey in Müller’s Reisende with that undertaken in Stern 111. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s concept of lateral agency and Karin Sorko’s understanding of dual system criticism, I will analyse processes of human interaction and belonging that differ from those associated with socialism and capitalism in the two narratives. Furthermore I will ask whether such lateral agency constitutes a form of political agency.

What Does Lauren Berlant Teach Us About Networked Affect?

Lauren Berlant’s profound legacy for affect theory, cultural studies, queer theory and adjacent fields centers on their socio-sensory attunement to the role of media, popular culture, and the aesthetic in shaping everyday experience within late capitalist America and far beyond. And yet, within the pervasively digitalized media cultures of the twenty first century, it is curious, perhaps, that Berlant rarely engaged directly with digital culture, nor has their work (with notable pockets of exception) been drawn on widely in accounts of networked media within media theory, digital humanities, or critical data studies (Pedwell 2023b; see also Azhar and Boler 2023). The central claim orienting this introductory essay, however, is that the uncommon instances in which Berlant does address digital technologies explicitly are instructive and, moreover, that there is much to be gained from mining Berlant’s rich oeuvre for what it teaches us about the changing relations among affect, subjectivity, digital culture, and ‘the political’ amid the intersecting crises of the present. The most significant lessons Berlant’s work imparts in this vein, we will argue, concern the affective workings and implications of mediation, genre, and infrastructure in our digital age—lessons which prompt us to confront the ineradicable persistence of uncertainty, ambivalence, and vulnerability within human-technology relations, alongside the vital role of transitional infrastructures in the emergent ethico-politics of networked affect.

Heteropessimism and the Pleasure of Saying “No”

Using Lauren Berlant’s keynote at the 2019 Duke Feminist Theory Workshop as a starting point, this article offers a comparative reading of feminism’s “heteropessimistic turn” and the involuntarily celibate (i.e., incel) movement. In doing so, I demonstrate that both groups are saying “no” to certain elements of what Berlant refers to as “the pleasure regimes of sexual normativity.” I focus on the affective function of heteropessimism—what Asa Seresin identifies as its “anesthetic feeling”—arguing that it affectively soothes but politically stultifies the feminist movement. Framing the incel movement in a heteropessimistic light, I dispute the common perception of incels as ‘merely’ misogynistic and argue that their totalizing sexual nihilism indicates a broader hatred of, and disidentification with, the politics of heterosexual desire. Introducing the example of “Black Pill Feminists,” I take the heteropessimistic connections between feminism and incel to their logical conclusion, showing that feminist heteropessimism’s inherent essentialism affectively cements the incongruous ideological positions of feminism to incel’s sexual nihilism. I conclude with an argument for the naturalization of negativity as part of a broader move toward accepting the ambiguities of heterosexual desire and the antagonism(s) that drive it.

“It Might Have a Little to Do with Wish Fulfillment”: The Life-Giving Force of Queer Performance in TTRPG Spaces

In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant asserts that “fantasy [can serve] as a life-sustaining defense against the attritions of ordinary violent history,” which is a statement that holds true for many queer role-players in TTRPG spaces (Berlant 2012, 45). Around the table, these worlds enable players to discover and render their identities legible in social utopian spaces and rehearse their performance for life outside of them. Through engaging with scholarship, autoethnographic writing, and cultural production surrounding TTRPGs, queer identity, avatars, and gender performance, this project asserts that TTRPGs function as safe spaces for becoming, due in part to the ability to create an avatar, or “flexible representational stand-in” for the self, that is queer and embodied through role-play (McMillan, 2015 13). This is achieved through tracking the author’s experience of discovering and forming their queer and trans identity through role-playing various characters and disciplining their function through related interdisciplinary theory across queer, feminist, and role-playing studies. Additionally, through utilizing additional ethnographic accounts and analyzing TTRPG-based media in theatre and actual play spaces, this project further establishes how the emancipatory potential in escapist TTRPG fantasy spaces can ultimately alter queer role-players’ engagement with material reality in a world adversarial to their existence and visibility, especially in light of the past few years.

Drysfeydd y Cymoedd: 1 The Sub-Topographies of South Wales Valleys’ Industrial Crises

In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Cathy Caruth defines as traumatic our encounters not with life-threatening events but with those that cause a break in our perception of time. She explains that the memory of trauma is always fleeting, leaving connections with the time and place of traumatic occurrence fragile and obscure. Caruth’s definitions shape the work of contemporary geographers who argue that trauma is fundamentally unmappable. Does trauma’s relationship to space change when traumatization becomes repetitive and systematic? To explore systematic traumatization’s relationship to space, I adopt Lauren Berlant’s trauma definition as a crisis of ordinariness and revisit the South Wales Valleys region and its coal mining history as traumatic and contested. Using the exceptional Aberfan 1966 disaster as a starting point, I investigate a more “common” industrial crisis of the same period and explore its relationship to the industrial space by analyzing its discursive and drawing records. In this journey, sketching out the spatial qualities of the colliery’s maze is crucial for understanding the crisis’ occurrence, its belatedness and commemoration.