Bad Feelings

Abstract

While the importance of negativity and negative affects to queer history and theory has been the subject of much recent critical discussion, bad feelings are equally prevalent in contemporary feminist theory. The aim of this article is not to provide a summary overview of a recent negative turn in feminist theory, however, nor to identify the early twenty-first century socio-political causes of this welling up of bad feeling. Rather, its purpose is to consider the way the increasing centrality of studies of affect to feminist histories and politics allows us to reconceptualise these as ‘affective genealogies'. The article examines this by focusing on three representative texts, which it takes as representative of three key moments in the recent affective genealogy of feminism: Rosi Braidotti's Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (2002); Sara Ahmed's The Promise of Happiness (2010); and Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism (2011).

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Foucault's point is that genealogy disintegrates the body, just the human sciences do away with the concept of the human:

The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history's destruction of the body. (1977, 83)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Stephens

Elizabeth Stephens is Associate Professor in Cultural Studies and Director of Research in the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Southern Cross University. Her books include Anatomy as Spectacle: Public Exhibitions of the Body from 1700 to the Present (2011) and Queer Writing: Homoeroticism in Jean Genet's Fiction (2009). She is currently completing a new book, A Critical Genealogy of Normality, with Peter Cryle.