Against Affect (Provocations) - Softcover

Downing, Lisa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1496242300 ISBN 13: 9781496242303

Verlag: University of Nebraska Press, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

Against Affect interrogates shibboleths of feeling and reason and their relationship with ideas of identity, gender, and freedom in the twenty-first century. Lisa Downing starts with the familiar premise that emotion has been historically gendered and racialized since the Enlightenment, with women, people of color, and other non-normative subjects associated with emotionality, and only white men with logic and reason. The "affective turn" in the academic humanities attempted to redress this injustice in the 1990s, and affect theory, ubiquitous today, revalorized precisely what was excluded from logos: the bodily, the emotive, and the experiential. But how effective has this strategy truly been in changing perceptions of marginalized forms of knowledge and subjectivity? Against Affect argues that the academic affective turn has prompted a broader cultural one, marked by increasing prioritization―and exploitation―of feeling over reason, issuing from both the political left and right.

Using a series of case studies, Against Affect explores how the deployment of a language of emotion in both the academic and cultural spheres constitutes a new normativity. In thinking against affect, Downing questions the efficacy and desirability of idealizing feeling and proposes instead the redistribution of reason.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lisa Downing is Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. She is the author or editor of twenty books, including Selfish Women and After Foucault: Culture, Theory, and Criticism in the 21st Century. She is an editor of Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Nebraska Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1496242300
• ISBN 13: 9781496242303
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 164
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande