Ugly Feelings Research Articles

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.

Wywlekanie na wierzch brzydkich uczuć i zdradliwość obietnicy szczęścia

This article is a polemic with two literary texts, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Sehee and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace. From among the metafictional devices, a concrete poetics of therapeutic discourse emerges. An analysis of the ways in which the experience of depression is thematized will be facilitated by defining Sianne Ngai’s characterization of “ugly feelings” and by noting that the whole process of discursivization is driven by what Sara Ahmed calls the promise of happiness. A critical look will expose some fixed elements of these poetics and outline the frame in which they operate. Key-words: depression, happiness, ugly feelings, sadness, therapeutic discourse

Negotiating ugly feelings: affect and body positivity in postfeminist times

ABSTRACT While body positivity and its relationship to postfeminism has been readily explored and critiqued, what has been less considered is the everyday affective, embodied experience of body positivity for those who engage with it. Building on work which considers the feeling rules of postfeminist cultures, I explore the various affective entanglements that emerge between body positivity on Instagram and the people who engage with it, drawing on interviews with body positivity advocates recruited via Instagram. I show that while body positivity offers intense experiences of affirmation and togetherness, these feelings are often fleeting and brief and, along with the labour involved in engaging with body positivity on Instagram—posting, liking, commenting—often bring with them feelings of exhaustion and frustration. Accordingly, advocates become engaged in a difficult bind of negotiating frustration, exhaustion and “ugly feelings” with the opportunities body positivity affords—affirmation, community, and togetherness. I conclude by exploring how participants’ continued attachments to body positivity despite its insufficiencies make visible the uneven effects of body positivity, in ways that highlight the classed and gendered workings of postfeminism.

Almost Happiness, But Not Quite: Reluctant Rule by Law and Thai Legal History in Seni Pramoj’s Legal Autobiography

This article engages with Thongchai Winichakul’s intellectual history of “Rule by Law” by using Greta Olson’s law and affect approach as a departure from the traditional field of law and literature, which focuses solely on discursive practices. It foregrounds the non-cathartic affect of reluctance, a less canonized emotion in Seni Pramoj’s autobiography as a meta-feeling that underpins all emotions such as pride, happiness, and shame in the meta-narrative of conservative Thai legal history. Introducing the concept of “Reluctant Rule by Law” and applying Sianne Ngai’s concept of ugly feelings, Lorianne York’s notion of reluctant celebrity, and postcolonial studies as a main framework, this article argues that Seni’s Janus-faced characteristic, navigating between Western legal modernity and Thai tradition, infused a reluctant tone into his historical works. This autobiographical reluctance reveals how the conservative Thai jurist upheld royalist nationalism while addressing semi-colonial ambiguities, perpetuating a semi-colonial reluctance that shapes the meta-narrative of conservative Thai legal history and constitutionalism based on royalist nationalism.

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.

Stuplime Orientalism

The essay reads Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism through Sianne Ngai’s category of the “stuplime”. Unlike the noble emotions elicited by the Kantian sublime, the stuplime causes the ugly feelings of tedium, excitation, fatigue. In the Kantian sublime, viewing subjects experience an overwhelming feeling which impresses on them their own inadequacy; in my reading of stuplime orientalism, the “Orient” becomes the object of this “inadequacy”. This shift from inadequate subjects to inadequate objects is one manifestation of the political valence of the stuplime, a means by which control is maintained both of the “Orient” as a colonial project and of the orientalist’s mind. As Ngai argues, however, the political potential of ugly feelings is always ambivalent: stuplime orientalism can therefore also be coopted through curation of stuplime orientalist detail, which I deploy in the second half of this essay to read Jade Snow Wong’s memoir, Fifth Chinese Daughter. Resisting the urge to summarize Jade Snow Wong’s exhaustively descriptive rice passages, I delineate an alternative interpretation to the prevailing view that she merely self-orientalizes, instead suggesting a reading that engages histories of denigrated racial formation and labour precisely through, and not in spite of, stuplime orientalist detail.

Disappointment and awkwardness as ugly feelings

Abstract What does transnational humanitarianism look like when considered from the perspective of a “Global East”? Ethnographically studying the disappointment and awkwardness generated by two transnational humanitarian projects illuminates a sense of suspended agency among Montenegrin citizens that was developed after the end of the Cold War. Montenegrins are often simultaneously included in the racialized and class-based humanitarian discourses of the Global North and excluded from actual participation in transnational humanitarian projects due to structural constraints. The article suggests that suspended agency emerges when there is both a sense of belonging to a certain humanitarian endeavor that should enable particular kinds of action (e.g., transnational humanitarianism) and a lack of infrastructure capable of sustaining such a sense.

Ugly Affective Politics in “Yambunera” by Bina Theeng

This paper studies affective politics generated by ugly feelings such as fear, contempt, and shame in the characters of the story “Yambunera” written by Bina Theeng from anthology of stories named Yambunera. The first part of this paper emphasizes on ugly feeling and affective politics as the major theoretical framework. Affect theory has evolved from studying emotions to using these emotions to analyze different aspects of human life, even nature. Ugly feelings are also called negative feelings which are related to emotions. The study investigates how these negative emotions are created, circulated and politicized. The second part is examination and interpretation of the characters of “Yambunera” through the negative feelings generated in them due to the state’s brutality and discrimination. The state is the major agency of rule and control that suppresses minority communities through different mediums will the major discussion of this part. This paper explores the state’s treatment on indigenous communities which has created negative feelings in the members. The state needs to provide basic needs and rights to all citizens. However, in the context of Nepal, the state has been using different methods of exploitation and suppression of native nations though it is a multicultural country.

Ugly Feelings in Philip Kan Gotanda’s The Wash

As a contemporary Japanese American playwright, Philip Kan Gotanda is noted for his realistic family dramas. The Wash, as his pivotal work, explores the perpetual impacts of racial discrimination and internment camp experience on Japanese immigrants. Although The Wash (1987) has been the object of intense critical study, there are more focus on identity formation, characterization and thematic concerns. This paper uses Sianne Ngai’s theory in her perspicacious book Ugly Feelings in which Ngai systematically proposes seven ugly feelings, namely, animatedness, envy, irritation, anxiety, stuplime, paranoia, and disgust to interpret predicaments implied in the affect signs. By analyzing the reasons and aftermath of Nobu’s three ugly feelings, paranoia, stuplime, and disgust, the author of this paper argues that Nobu is both the victim and victimizer of racial discrimination. As a victim, the protagonist’s negativity is originated from Camp trauma, racism, and traditional Japanese ideology. As a victimizer, his negative feelings inflict in her kinsfolk and intergroup. By writing the collapse of a small family, Gotanda creates a miniature while hints continuous and detrimental influences of systemic racism and interminority racism.

Thinking Through Affective Uncertainty: What Does it Do, and How is it Relevant to Our Contemporary Moment?

How is affective uncertainty produced in art and performance? What does it do as a dramaturgical tool and artistic strategy? The text discusses a politically engaged theatre performance, Your Majesties by Navaridas & Deutinger, and the different strategies used to produce affective uncer tainty and ambivalence in its spectators. This uncertainty can be understood as an unsettlement, and as a tension fraught atti tude that might lead to 'ugly feelings' and suspended agency (Ngai 2005). How do we as spectators navigate our own uncertainties and ambivalence? This entails attentive lis tening to the voices saturating the complex theme, and to tensions causing our uncer tainties. Such affective conditions, however, might also carry a critical potential—useful for navigating our contemporary moment and its many urgencies. The article will also discuss how affective uncertainty ties in with the so called affective turn. in contemporary art and theatre. This was prompted by an interest to study its performative qualities, as well as to take a closer look at what the critical potential of spectator experiences of uncertainty might be. As the title of this essay already shows, this text is guided by the question: What does affective uncertainty do (as a drama turgical and artistic strategy), and how is it relevant to our contemporary moment? To answer this, I will draw on an example from the field of politically engaged contempo rary theatre.

Tiffany Pollard GIFs and nostalgia for the negative

ABSTRACT This essay asks how the nostalgic attachments to particular Black women’s performances on reality television inform current uses of those images through internet GIFs and memes. Examining the usage and exchange of files depicting the mid-2000s reality television star Tiffany Pollard on Twitter, I compare appropriation of black women’s humour within digital spaces alongside appreciation of ‘bad television’ [McCoy, C.A., and Scarborough, R.C., 2014. Watching “bad” television: ironic consumption, camp, and guilty pleasures. Poetics, 47, 41–59] and the useful potentials of ‘negative’ representation [Gates, R.J., 2018. Double negative: The black image and popular culture. Duke University Press]. Debates about representational politics are complicated when circulating digital images and files that invoke nostalgic response through racialized gendered performances. What does circulation of these GIFs and memes say about nostalgia for a unique moment in reality television where ‘ratchet’ behaviour [Brock, A., 2020. Distributed blackness. New York University Press] was encouraged and the limits of respectability politics were experimented with? Examining how some have labelled exchange of these GIFs as perpetuating ‘digital blackface’ [Jackson, L.M., 2017. We need to talk about digital blackface in reaction GIFs. Teen vogue, 2], I theorize how contemporary accusations of exploiting stereotypical depictions of Black people in order to gain online social capital mirrors the history of American minstrelsy’s purported nostalgia for ‘authentic’ Black performance. As the majority of popular GIFs of Pollard present ‘ugly feelings’ [Ngai, S., 2005. Ugly Feelings. Harvard University Press] such as irritation, resentment and disgust, the relationship between nostalgia for so-called better times, and desire for a recent moment in cable television’s past in which the boundaries of ‘good representation’ were pushed and disregarded become entangled. By looking to animation of disembodied digital images in the use of GIFs as moving image files that are looped, refigured and circulated, I draw attention to new sites of digital racialization, popular culture criticism and examination of digital affect as it corresponds with Black diasporic cultural production.

Pixel, Partition, Persona: Machine Vision and Face Recognition in Kazuo Ishiguro’s <i>Klara and the Sun</i>

This article examines the relationship between machine vision, face recognition and affect in Kazuo Ishiguro’s speculative fiction novel Klara and the Sun (2021). It explores the ways that Ishiguro’s novel enacts, stages, and dramatises cognitive and emotional acts of comprehension and empathy through ‘face reading’. The article takes up Guillemette Bolen’s theorisation of ‘kinesic imagination’ and Sianne Ngai’s concept of ‘ugly feelings’ to investigate the affective and representational dilemmas of technological face recognition in speculative fiction. Through the careful treatment of literary language, itself a complex response to rapidly evolving technology, Klara and the Sun presents instances of affective subtlety, hesitation, ambiguity, mutability, confusion and deficit to solicit an emotional response in the reader concerning the sociotechnical reception and future possibilities of machine vision and facial recognition technologies. In this way, Ishiguro’s novel offers a timely challenge to the algorithmic design principles of face-recognition technology due to its complex affective (rather than purely categorical) treatment of both human and non-human faces.

Deluge of Affects

This article examines Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Kathleen Hepburn’s film The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open (2019) through the lens of materialist and feminist affect theories as they intersect with critical Indigeneity. It investigates how the film produces two parallel and conflicting reactions in the viewer, for whom “ugly feelings” (Ngai, 2007), such as failure, embarrassment, pity or shame, compete with an overwhelming and often frustrated need for empathy and compassion.

Ugly Book Feelings: Materiality and Negative Affect in Late Medieval Women’s Writing

Abstract Drawing on the work of Sianne Ngai in Ugly Feelings (2005), in this essay we focus on two examples from early fifteenth-century medieval literature that represent medieval books as ‘ugly’ either because they arouse negative feelings of aversion or disgust or because they are considered in some way aesthetically lacking or inadequate. Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la cité des dames and Margery Kempe’s Book of Margery Kempe present women’s involvement with troubling or difficult books. The ‘ugly book feelings’ which both narrators encounter challenge not only their authority as writers, but their very sense of self. Such feelings, however, are transitory when placed in narrative context: in the two examples we discuss, a single material text serves as the catalyst for a moment of emotional transformation which may be spiritual and/or intellectual. Attending to literary representations of ugly book feelings, we argue, complements existing scholarship on late medieval women’s relationship to material textual culture by placing such feelings at the centre of a broad emotional spectrum.

The Spatiality of Unpleasant Feelings in Manu Joseph’s Serious Men

While scholars have paid attention to the workings of neoliberal fantasies and misogynistic views in Manu Joseph’s novel Serious Men (2010), Joseph’s employment of unpleasant feelings has largely remained unexplored. This article examines the novel’s engagement with unpleasant feelings such as agitation, envy, and vengeance to highlight the tripartite connections between neoliberalism, casteism, and heteropatriarchy in present-day India. Drawing insights from postcolonial studies, affect studies, and critical caste studies, it demonstrates that in Serious Men, public and institutional spaces engender socially marginalized and emotionally wounded subjects by shaping their unpleasant feelings. Specifically, the article builds on and extends Sianne Ngai’s theorization of “ugly feelings” and works with the concept of the spatiality of unpleasant feelings to chart Joseph’s depictions of neoliberal spaces and their affects, the deep-rooted feelings and psychological compulsions of his characters, and the ordinary violence of casteism and heteropatriarchy that is normalized in India. Subsequently, it argues that by employing the unpleasant feelings of the Dalit protagonist and the only woman scientist in the novel, Joseph underlines the intersections between caste hierarchies and gender hierarchies and invites us to think about the gap between unpleasant feelings that are reasonable and the unjust actions these feelings lead to.

Framing stigma as an avoidable social harm that widens inequality.

This article discusses the social harms arising out of stigma experienced by people who use drugs (PWUD), and how stigmatisation compromises 'human flourishing' and constrains 'life choices'. Drawing on Wellcome Trust qualitative research using in-depth, semi-structured interview data (N = 24) with people who use heroin, crack cocaine, spice and amphetamine, this article firstly provides insight into how stigma is operationalised relationally between people via a lens of class talk and drug use predicated on normative ideas of 'valued personhood'. Secondly, it turns to how stigma is weaponised in social relations to keep people 'down', and thirdly, it shows how stigma is internalised as blame and shame and felt deeply 'under the skin' as 'ugly feelings'. Findings from the study show that stigma harms mental health, inhibits access to services, increases feelings of isolation, and corrodes a person's sense of self-worth as a valued human being. These relentless negotiations of stigma are painful, exhausting and damaging for PWUD, culminating in, as I argue, everyday acts of social harm that come to be normalised.

Netflix and cringe – affectively watching ‘uncomfortable’ TV

In this study, we conceptualise the phenomenon of cringe watching in order to understand why and how consumers engage with media that make them uncomfortable. We mobilise de-Western feminist thought to analyse our reactions to the Netflix series Indian Matchmaking. We find that ‘cringe’ is a bundle of consumers’ ‘ugly feelings’ belying complicated affect and biases that are often rooted in Western values. By leveraging collaborative autoethnography as our method, we allow space for both ‘visceral’ and ‘rational’ experiences, challenging the role of researchers as subjects by positioning ourselves, additionally, as objects. Our findings reveal that engaging with media artefacts is a recursive process wherein consumers may encounter ‘cringe’, which when subject to introspection reveals unexpected socio-affective states like self-compassion, empathy for others, and understanding their own limitations as well as their place in the world. These findings have implications for marketing and consumer research on media, representation, and affect.

Métiers d’exposition : le travail des affects laids dans Gardien Party

This article studies the presence of ugly feelings in Gardien Party, a play written by Mohamed El Khatib and Valérie Mréjen. Examining the specific example of irritation, we will describe the political and aesthetic work of this so-called negative emotion, namely its impact on the production and reception of the play. Irritation, as an affect, will be placed in juxtaposition with laughter, the presence of which also sheds light on the project’s purpose.

On Navigating Paranoia, Repair, and Ambivalence as Crip Pandemic Affects, Or, I’m So Paranoid, I Think Your COVID Test Is About Me

How do my 'hermeneutics of suspicion' color this current crisis? In this auto-theoretical essay, I reflect upon the blend of judgment, suspicion, and paranoia that have settled into my body-mind this past year, and how these feelings shape my engagement with people, institutions, and systems. I have been taught that 'judgment' is an essential aspect of immigrant and crip safety. Recently, it has become my (crip)epistemology, and I cannot decide whether this is for better or worse. On the one hand, suspicion is productive. It has kept me and my loved ones alive in a time of deliberate death. On the other, it frustrates, disrupting my capacity for connection. I check my temperature constantly, I hear the guilt in my voice when my family in India tell me they have not left the apartment in months, I spend precious time with friends calculating their risk relative to mine, I go to protests but am afraid of the consequences of my solidarity. Drawing on Eve Sedgwick's essay on paranoid reading practices, Patricia Stuelke's Ruse of Repair, Sianne Ngai's work on ugly feelings, Nikolas Rose's analyses of somatic ethics, and Mel Chen's theory of racialized toxins, I explore the modalities that paranoia has both enabled and disabled for me. I examine my ambivalent relationship with repair—some reparative practices like mutual aid sustain queer/crip/immigrant community while others like cure constrict our lives. This piece aims to tease out the tensions latent in crip worldmaking between suspicion and generosity, public health and communal care, and paranoia and repair.

Enduring Emotions. Fat Time and Weight Loss in the Finnish Body Positive Podcasts Jenny and the Fat Myth Busters and The Soft

ABSTRACT The article analyses two Finnish body positive podcasts, Jenny and the Fat Myth Busters and The Soft, zooming in on their way of discussing weight loss. Drawing on queer studies’ understanding of queer time, the article discusses fat time as a nonlinear temporality, which, as a product of fat-marginalizing culture, is hurtful yet characterized by a potential to resist. The article utilizes Sara Ahmed, Rebecca Coleman, and Sienne Ngai’s formulations of emotions and temporality. It utilizes the method of a situated close reading where the author’s experience with weight loss works as an important resource for analysis. The article argues that fat time is characterized by “ugly feelings that stay.” The endurance of feelings expands existing understandings of fatness by arguing that fat could be discussed as an affective presence beside it being viewed as a material reality. Even as the body changes, emotions such as anxiety and pessimism endure, making both the present and future fat.