No 7 (2016)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://gupea-staging.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/80630

Exploring Affect

During the past decades, »The Affective Turn« has emerged as an important interdisciplinary research field at the intersection of the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. Problematizing the major role accorded to reason in modernity, it is characterized by an attempt to highlight emotions, for example in works of art, in intimate relationships, in politics and in various historical contexts. This project is part of a broader theoretical debate, where the emphasis on emotions is connected to a reformulation of fundamental concepts in theory, such as reason, consciousness, the subject, and the body; as well as a questioning of dichotomies, for example between humans and animals, humans and machines, and between men and women.

This special issue of LIR.journal presents articles written in the disciplines of literature, history, cultural history, gender studies, and philosophy. It is based on the activities of the feminist multidisciplinary Nordic and Baltic network Exploring affect. A part of the migratory scholarly institution Nordic Summer University, funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers, the network arranged six conferences between 2013 and 2015. The articles published here are the outcome of the network’s final year. The symposium »Exploring affect: Love« was organized in collaboration with the Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion, University of Gothenburg, in February 2015. The session »Exploring affect: Politics« took place in July the same year in Druskininkai, Lithuania, in cooperation with the European Humanities University. The network’s coordinator Johanna Sjöstedt is the initiator and, together with Johanna Lindbo, the editor of the issue.

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Now showing 1 - 8 of 8

Sensual Grass Touching Humid Skin: Finding Love in the Relationship between Subject and Landscape
(LIR. journal, 2016) Lindbo, Johanna
The starting point of this article is the notion of landscapes as intra-active places for dwelling and becoming. Informed by feminist and material ecocritical theory, it aims to make visible a connection between vegetation, water, dirt, affect, and subjects in literary texts. Against a comparative backdrop of the work of the French philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir, the article looks at the relationship between humans and nature in contemporary Swedish literature. The analyses explore three fictional young women’s experiences of being-innature in three novels: Hanna Nordenhök’s Det vita huset i Simpang (The White House in Simpang) (2013), Sara Stridsberg’s Happy Sally (2004) and Mare Kandre’s Bübins unge (Bübin’s kid) (1987). The purpose is to investigate how literary texts can depict and convey experiences of sensuality, embodiment, and belonging within landscapes as something meaningful in terms of the subject’s continuous process of becoming. It is argued that the novels articulate intimate and tactile bonds between the young women and the organic en vironment that combine creation and destruction, sometimes resembling notions of love.
A Special Place in the Heart. Human-Animal Affection in Lena Furberg’s Stallgänget på Tuva
(LIR. journal, 2016) Nygren, Anna
This article examines emotions in girls’ relationships with horses as portrayed in Lena Furberg’s cartoon Stallgänget på Tuva (The Stable-Gang at Tuva). Published in the comic Min Häst (My Horse) between 1996 and 2008, the cartoon is an example of the literary genre of the horse book and a broader culture of (fictive and non-fictive) girl-horse-relations. Showcasing a series of sequences from the cartoon, the article suggests various ways to understand the human-animal bonds in relation to other kinds of relationships, to notions of what relationships are and can be and to extant social structures, such as sexism, racism, and capitalism. In the analyses theories from the fields of feminist theory, critical animal studies and practical knowledge are employed. Haraway’s notion of »companion species« is of particular importance. The article also discusses how the reader’s emotions could be interpreted and touches briefly on the subject of fiction and reality, and how the borders between these are reformulated in relation to the horse book reader.
Freedom or Love? Marriage, Single Life, and the Road to Happiness in Swedish 1920s Magazines
(LIR. journal, 2016) Severinsson, Emma
This article analyses discourses about self-supporting women in Swedish women’s magazines in the 1920s, after the attainment of legal equality in marriage and the acquisition of the right to vote. The self-supporting middle class woman was a controversial figure in this context. On the one hand symbolizing freedom and independence, she was on the other hand ridiculed and labelled mannish and unattractive. The article pays special attention to the notions of happiness, freedom, love, and marriage in the material. Depending on how they were coded in relation to each other, they gained different meanings. When happiness was connected to freedom, it was emphasized that a woman could never be happy within marri age; however, when happiness was tied to love, it was claimed that happiness was attainable in marriage. Freedom and marriage were thus incompatible in both discourses. Love was restricted to marriage. The article demonstrates that there was a negotiation around the position of the middle class woman during the 1920s, which in turn led to an expansion of possible identity positions for women.
Contradiction and Radical Hope: Utopia as Method in the Lived Experience of Love
(LIR. journal, 2016) Vulliamy, Catherine
In this article, I explore the contradictions, tensions and hopefulness of love. Participants in my research shared accounts of love that acknowledged the anguish, loss and pain of love in uneven political worlds marked by patriarchal power structures and heteronormative assumption. At the same time as confronting the difficulty of negotiating love in this context, the accounts continued to express a determined sense of hope about love. I employ a dialectical approach in order to apprehend the paradoxes and tensions inherent to the lived experience of love. As I investigate the meanings and implications of both the contradictions of love, and the hope in love’s potential to transform, I use Ruth Levitas’ concept of utopia as method to show how the radical hope of love emerges directly from the contradictions of love as a means of imagining and creating new social worlds.
With a Little Help From My Friends. Gender and Intimacy in Two Friendship Research Projects
(LIR. journal, 2016) Alenius Wallin, Linn; Goedecke, Klara
Friendship is an undertheorized but increasingly important relationship in late modernity. In this article, the authors present findings from two ongoing research projects about friendship, gender and age in contemporary Sweden. They argue that discourses about gender and friendship are highly relevant for how friendship is conceptualized both among men and women, but that culturally ingrained conceptions of men’s inability and women’s capacity to be close friends ought to be problematized further, from feminist perspectives. Furthermore, they discuss friendship practices, problematizing the frequent equation of friendship and intimate dialogues, which are important but may overshadow other friendship practices, like various kinds of support. The authors show that such support is negotiated in relation to ideas of ideal friendship, permeated by reciprocity and equality, and call for further feminist research about friendship, arguing that a feminist perspective can destabilize gendered dichotomies and contribute to problematizing power relations, vulnerabilities and exclusions in friendships.
Killjoy and the Politics of Laughter. Russian Television Humour about Alyaksandr Lukashenka and its Reception in Belarusian Online Media
(LIR. journal, 2016) Minchenia, Alena
Drawing upon the perspective of the cultural studies of emotions, this article examines the reception of political satire and the re-contextualization of humour. More precisely, it investigates the multiplicity of tensions that come into play in the production, erasure, rediscovery, and reception in Belarusian Internet media of politically oriented Russian television humour mocking the Belarusian president Alyaksandr Lukashenka. The very phenomenon of comical representation aims at triggering a particular type of viewer response: laughter. But what if there is no laughter? To study this pheno menon, the concept of unlaughter, coined by Michael Billig, is drawn upon. Resonating with Sara Ahmed’s term killjoy, it helps to uncover inequalities reproduced in the circulation of humour. Who laughs and who is laughed at? The article looks at the construction of subjects and objects of laughter, as well as the emotions helping to shape the two. The extent to which the particular case discussed in this article might be illustrative of a broader function of political humour and unlaughter in creating and challenging power differentials is considered.
What Can an Affect Do? Notes on the Spinozist-Deleuzean Account
(LIR. journal, 2016) Kristensen, Kasper
The role of cognition and the thought-determining power of affects has been a subject of lively debate within current affect theory. In this article I focus on a recent critique put forth by Leys and Zerilli, according to which scholars, e.g. Massumi, inspired by the Spinozist-Deleuzean understanding of affect arrive at such a strong dichotomy between cognitive judgment and affects that it leads to affective determinism. Arguing that there is a considerable gap between Massumi’s influential Spinozist-Deleuzean inspired notion of affects and the definitions that Spinoza and Deleuze’ reading of Spinoza actually present, I show how key points in the contemporary critique concerning the ontology, epistemology, and emancipatory politics of the new affect theory would be positioned in the Spinozist-Deleuzean account of affects. I conclude by claiming that the Spinozist-Deleuzean account in fact serves as one possible way of distinguishing between emancipatory and enslaving affects, hence hoping to clarify contemporary discussions about the emancipatory nature of affects.
Editorial - Introduction
(LIR. journal, 2016) Sjöstedt, Johanna

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