Elspeth Probyn

The Affect Theory Reader

This field-defining collection consolidates and builds momentum in the burgeoning area of affect studies. The contributors include many of the central theorists of affect—those visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing that can serve to drive us toward movement, thought, and ever-changing forms of relation. As Lauren Berlant explores “cruel optimism,” Brian Massumi theorizes the affective logic of public threat, and Elspeth Probyn examines shame, they, along with the other contributors, show how an awareness of affect is opening up exciting new insights in disciplines from anthropology, cultural studies, geography, and psychology to philosophy, queer studies, and sociology. In essays diverse in subject matter, style, and perspective, the contributors demonstrate how affect theory illuminates the intertwined realms of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the political as they play out across bodies (human and non-human) in both mundane and extraordinary ways. They reveal the broad theoretical possibilities opened by an awareness of affect as they reflect on topics including ethics, food, public morale, glamor, snark in the workplace, and mental health regimes. The Affect Theory Reader includes an interview with the cultural theorist Lawrence Grossberg and an afterword by the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart. In the introduction, the editors suggest ways of defining affect, trace the concept’s history, and highlight the role of affect theory in various areas of study. Contributors Sara Ahmed Ben Anderson Lauren Berlant Lone Bertelsen Steven D. Brown Patricia Ticineto Clough Anna Gibbs Melissa Gregg Lawrence Grossberg Ben Highmore Brian Massumi Andrew Murphie Elspeth Probyn Gregory J. Seigworth Kathleen Stewart Nigel Thrift Ian Tucker Megan Watkins

Teaching Bodies: Affects in the Classroom

This article reintroduces notions of the experiential, lived body as crucial for teaching. It critiques some recent moves within women’s studies, and cultural studies more generally, to use ‘theory’ as a way of abstracting bodies from the classroom. Using the work of Silvan Tomkins on affects, and Deleuzian notions of the body, it argues for a more comprehensive account of the affects, politics and practices of pedagogy.

Sporting Bodies: Dynamics of Shame and Pride

Drawing on examples of mainstream sport and the philosophy of the Gay Games, this article uses sporting bodies to rethink the links between sexuality, pride and shame. The contrast between the two highlights the ways in which the Gay Games downplays the dynamics of shame and competition in favour of its project of pride. Against the domestication of the body in some theories of embodiment, it is argued that shame may provide a productive ground for revitalizing the study of the body in terms of affect, politics and ethics.

Shame in the habitus

It’s September 11, 2002. I awake listening to the news. I’m in Australia, so we’ve arrived early to this day of memorializing. On the other side of the dateline, the rest of the world is preparing to deal with a welter of emotion. On the radio a somewhat incoherent man in New York talks about how he’ll drink a lot of ‘brewskis’ tomorrow. The interviewer is sympathetic. Bodies do strange things under stress. They act out. Like plants, our bodies are tropic, and twist and turn in reaction to different stimuli. Think of those reports from New York of ‘terror sex’ and the surge of interest in singles’ bars. All those bodies madly moving, seeking and turning to other bodies, like so many flowers orienting themselves towards the light. The warmth of another body, being held and holding – a momentary balm for frayed nerve endings. Bodies in embrace burning out the fear in the dim light of a bar. Perhaps it worked for a while. But then bodies broke apart. Specialists in trauma tell us that trauma is the overwhelming feeling of too much feeling. ‘Affect-flooding’ causes our bodies to want to shut down, to turn away. Too much feeling. Every minute change in stimulus causes the body to shift, and ‘it moves as it feels and it feels itself moving’ (Massumi, 2002:1). More movement, more feeling. Brian Massumi describes the way that ‘the slightest, most literal displacement convokes a qualitative difference, because as directly as it conducts itself it beckons a feeling, and feelings have a way of folding into each other, resonating together, interfering with each other, mutually intensifying, all in unquantifiable ways apt to unfold again in action, often unpredictably’ (2002:1). So a tiny movement, perhaps so slight a shift that other parts of the body remain unaware, sets off sensors that register in feeling another feeling. It’s all so small. The densely worded explanations defy meaning, squeeze it out. Or maybe meaning reappears in unfamiliar places. In the world changed forever, feelings are thrown around blithely and they too cease to have much meaning. Ordinary people and men of distinction can only repeat the words. Writing in The Guardian, Jay McInerney, talks about his

IV. Silences Behind the Mantra: Critiquing Feminist Fat:

What lies behind the slogan, ‘fat is a feminist issue’? Obviously a book: Susie Orbach’s (1978) text. Many today are surprised to learn that the phrase originated as a title. On a 2007 blog, ‘PastaQueen’ writes she thought it was just ‘a phrase I’d heard thrown about’ (2007). Legions of women have found solace in Orbach’s work, which has been all to the good. However, at the level of feminist theory and methodology, I want to argue that the slogan has morphed into an incoherent perspective called ‘body image’, the effects of which greatly hinder feminist understandings of fat. To use a precise term from Foucault’s (1982) methodology for the analysis of discourse, one can say that the ‘body image’ discourse is now a rarefied and pervasive form of knowledge, spreading across government programmes (in Australia, the ‘Body Think’ initiative in Victoria, in the UK the ‘Body Image’ summit), hospital treatment programmes for eating disorders, school curricula and education programmes, academic analyses in several disciplines (many not equipped with any methodological expertise in media analysis) to, of course, the media itself. To be schematic, the fixation on the image tends to fix bodies in the sense it renders understandings of bodies as static – and here I intend the double sense: the analyses themselves are static and they produce bodies as static, something that is image but not feelings, emotions and affects, as something untouched by economics, class and ethnic positioning. Translated into identity politics, this imparts a hyper surveillance to what bodies look like, and obviates the different feelings bodies experience both in terms of intra-experience (background, personal history, etc.) and inter-experience (in terms of insults, praise, etc.). Fat is still a feminist issue. However, the ways in which it has been articulated as feminist desperately need to be revisited and profoundly changed. There is

Bikinis and Bandages: An Itinerary for Cosmetic Surgery Tourism

This paper explores the ways in which cosmetic surgery tourism can be thought of specifically as a tourist experience. We argue that whilst essentially involving travel for the purpose of undertaking painful surgery, cosmetic surgery tourism has a particular resonance with the holiday, most usually constructed as relaxing and restorative. This resonance is connected to the importance in contemporary society of not simply possessing the cultural capital associated with travel knowledge and conspicuous leisure, but of being able to mark that upon and express it through the body. The paper also explores the elements of tourism that seem important to a successful cosmetic surgery tourism experience. These include a sense of place, constituted through cultural and physical proximity or distance, and discursive and physical construction of a destination’s particular characteristics – most usually in terms of the idea of ‘retreat’, care and the ‘friendliness’ of its people. This is connected to the willingness of a range of staff, from surgeons and nurses to interpreters and tour guides, to engage in successful emotional and aesthetic labour; some of these forms of labour are outlined here. The material we draw upon has tended to centre on white, middle-class Western tourists travelling to destinations outside the wealthiest nations for their surgeries. We end with a call for more wide-ranging studies and wonder whether the ‘tourism-ness’ of cosmetic surgery tourism remains central to tourists whose only motivation for travel is finding surgeries at minimal cost.

Beyond Food/Sex Eating and an Ethics of Existence

This article questions whether food is replacing sex as the ground of identity negotiation. Examining several food sites, and following Foucaults suggestive remarks about the Greek dietetic regimen, I argue that food can be seen as a line that intersects with sexuality. Rather than privileging either, an alternative ethics can be glimpsed in the doubling of food and sex.

‘Affective eduscapes’: the case of Indian students within Australian international higher education

In this article we examine the financial, cultural and governmental structures that frame international education as an important part of Appudurais ethnoscapes of globalization. Developing the idea of affective eduscapes we analyse the lived experiences of Indian students. Drawing on interview material, we deconstruct the idea of ‘the Indian student’, and any singular experience of international higher education.

Remote Control: New Media, New Ethics

1. Introduction: an ethics of engagement Elspeth Probyn and Catharine Lumby 2. Real appeal - the ethics of reality TV Catharine Lumby 3. Arguing about ethics Duncan Ivison 4. Their own media in their own language John Hartley * Beyond the disconnect: practical ethics interview with Maxine McKew 5. A viable ethics: journalists and the ethnic question Ghassan Hage 6. Ethics, entertainment and the tabloid: the case of talkback radio in Australia Graeme Turner * Money versus ethics interview with Mike Carlton 7. Eating into ethics: passion, food and journalism Elspeth Probyn * Beyond food porn: interview with Cherry Ripe 8. Ethics impossible? Advertising and the infomercial Anne Dunn * Pitching to the tribes: new ad techniques interview with Jim Moser 9. Diary of a Webdiarist: ethics goes online Margo Kingston 10. Control-SHIFT: censorship and the Internet Kate Crawford * Representing asylum seekers interview with Linda Jaivin 11. The ethics of porn on the Net Kath Albury *Ethics and sex interview with Fiona Patten 12. Grassroots ethics: the case of souths versus news corporation Michael Moller 13. Great pretenders: ethics and the rise of pranksterism Milissa Deitz * The limits of satire interview with John Safran.

Women following fish in a more-than-human world

Drawing on ethnographic and interview research conducted in Scotland, South Australia and New South Wales, Australia, I attempt to frame the cultural, social and geographical networks created by the people who follow fish (primarily commercial fishers). My account is constructed through a ‘self-conscious storying’ (Whatmore 2008) deployed by geographers working in a more-than-human perspective. Although I find much to inspire from this approach, throughout this article the question that nags at me is how to account for women within a materialist more-than-human framework, and how to articulate a feminist politics within this epistemological and methodological space. I try to avoid admonitions about what should be done and to advance or to model an embodied glimpse of what such a politics might be.