Ugly feelings: gender, neoliberalism and the affective relations of body concerns

ABSTRACT

Ugly feelings are ‘weak, nasty’ and enduring feelings which have particular socio-cultural significance and functions in neoliberal contexts. Drawing on a qualitative study of women’s everyday experiences of gender, wellbeing and the body, I develop Ngai’s ‘ugly feelings’ framework alongside a Deleuzian-Spinozan understanding of affect to understand the affective implications of gendered body concerns – extending the famous Spinozan question of ‘what can a body do?’ to ask ‘what can the ugly feelings of body concern do, and how do they affect the range of options for living available in the gendered context of neoliberalism?’ Women in the study described body concerns as generalised ‘worry’ and heightened attentiveness to the body’s physical characteristics, and having the potential to morph into ‘obsession’ and ‘disgust’, the ‘ugliest of ugly feelings’ Ngai (2004: 335). Where body concerns became ‘intolerable’, ugly feelings of worry about appearance turned to bodily ‘disgust’ and led to the more ‘damaging’, rigid affective relations which constrain a body’s capacities. The ugly feelings of body concern can be understood as a key component by which bodies are currently constituted in the context of gendered neoliberalism, and the processes by which gender is itself made and remade through everyday life.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• gender
• postfeminism
• the body
• body image

Acknowledgments

I sincerely thank the journal editors and two anonymous reviewers who provided really thoughtful feedback on an earlier version of this paper. I also thank colleagues Akane Kanai, David Farrugia and Steve Threadgold for their insights and ideas in developing this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. ‘Postfeminism’ is a critical analytic term used by feminist scholars to describe the representation of women in 1990s media culture, where the goals of feminism were presented as achieved, and a new generation of girls were argued to have the ‘world at their feet’ (Harris 2004). Postfeminism described the distinctly anti-feminist sensibility in the popular media at the time, where feminism seemed to be constantly on the agenda and ‘taken into account’, whilst being ‘repudiated’ (McRobbie, 2009). Gill (2016) coined the phrase ‘postfeminist sensibility’ to describe how postfeminism could and should be used as a critical concept and analytic tool for exploring the ‘ideas, images, and meanings’ relating to women, feminism and neoliberalism in contemporary popular culture (see Banet-Weiser et al., 2019).

2. ‘While the concept of affect can be linked to emotion, affect extends beyond emotions as individually experienced feelings to instead focus on the ways bodies both shape and are shaped by their physical and social environments. Ahmed (2004: 2) specifies that unlike emotions, affects are not understood as inherent qualities of particular bodies. This enables a focus not on what emotions are but what they do; what connections they enable bodies to make, and what actions they evoke. Similarly, ‘feelings’ can be understood as experiential embodied sensations which are ‘felt’ in a body, yet also extend beyond corporeal confines to connect to other bodies and assemblages. In this way, feelings can be understood as similar to but more than pre-defined emotions such as ‘anger’ or ‘sadness’. A focus on affect also takes in qualities of feeling or sensation which are otherwise difficult to define or articulate (such as when Cara describes the affective tipping point when general life stress is redirected towards criticism of her bodily appearance as the ‘cherry on top’).

3. The traditional method of photo-voice, a participatory method designed to give participants control over the data they produce, is expanded to operate through a digital platform on which participants were able to post photographs, videos, text and other creative contributions (see Higgins et al., 2016). This is designed to enable smartphones to be used to capture the rich ‘everyday’ nature of embodiment to be explored in a way that would not be possible through other methods such as interviews only.

4. Following the theoretical framework, the methods of interviewing and photo elicitation do not aim to capture or represent the ‘speaking subject’. Rather, these methods are intended to ‘enter into a discussion’, and ‘gather the relations of affect … that affect an individual’ (Fox & Ward, 2008, p. 1013). Others have also methodologically reworked traditional qualitative methods such as interviewing, photo elicitation and photo-voice, approaching text and images as affective and relational, rather than flat representations of experience (Bell, 2012; Fox & Alldred, 2015; Higgins et al., 2016).

5. Most participants showed a combination of photos that had been taken specifically for the project, alongside others they had taken previously and deemed ‘relevant’ to wellbeing and the study’s focus. The photographs participants had taken for the project (‘truer’ to the method of photo-voice) enabled them to speak about the process and sensations related to the taking of the photo, and how it intra-acted with their thoughts and interpretation of the task in relation to wellbeing. The instances where participants were able to reflect on how and why particular photos were taken shows how gendered policing can be felt through the body.

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Julia Coffey

Julia Coffey is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research and publications in Sociology are focused on themes of the body, gender, youth, and health. Her research monograph Body Work: Youth, Gender and Health (2016) is published by Routledge, and she has co-edited Learning Bodies: The Body in Youth and Childhood Studies (2016), published by Springer.