Breivik and I: affective encounters with ‘failed’ masculinity in stories about right-wing terrorism

ABSTRACT

For feminist theory, the search for the material has often found its way via affect. As an immanent and seemingly pre-discursive and bodily experience, affects seem to offer a way out of the language and discourse trap. But should affect really be understood as solely a material matter? If every phenomenon is material-discursive, as Karen Barad suggests, cannot affect, as an immanent and lived bodily experience also be both material and discursive? In this article, I will approach these questions through a reading of a small selection of texts that tell the story of Anders Behring Breivik and the terrorist attack in Norway on 22 July 2011. In a troubling encounter with these stories, I found myself identifying with Breivik, an identification that led to an intense affective experience of anxiety and disgust, but also to an emotional self-reflexive elaboration on shame and guilt. This article presents an analysis of the prevalence of norms on white, adult masculinity in the stories about Breivik, as well as a theoretical elaboration on the relationship between affect and emotion, matter and language, and its relevance for the study of masculinity and violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Affects
• emotions
• masculinity
• Breivik
• terrorism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Mia Eriksson holds a Ph.D. in Gender Studies and works as a lecturer in Gender Studies and Sociology at Linnaeus University in Växjö.

Notes

1. My material consisted of three books: Aage Borchgrevink’s A Norwegian Tragedy: Anders Behring Breivik and the Massacre on Utøya, Erika Fatland’s Året utan sommar [The year without summer], and Åsne Seierstad’s One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway; a special issue of the Norwegian cultural magazine Samtiden; and newspaper articles from Dagens Nyheter, Aftonbladet, Svenska Dagbladet, and Sydsvenskan.

2. Breivik was wearing a homemade police uniform during the attack.

3. An approach that Probyn (2005, p. 141) herself, in a discussion on Gilles Deleuze, opens up for: ‘he argues that the body is not a unified entity but is composed of many moving elements. Affects play a crucial role in how assemblages are composed and decomposed’.