Kristyn Gorton

Theorizing emotion and affect: Feminist engagements

There is a long history of theoretical work on emotion and affect. Indeed Ann Cvetkovich argues that ‘the representation of social problems as affective dilemmas can be traced to its origins in eighteenthand nineteenth-century culture’ (1992: 2). More recently, in the 1980s, feminist theorists such as Lila Abu-Lughod (1986), Arlie Russell Hochschild (1985), bell hooks (1989), Alison Jaggar (1989), Audre Lorde (1984), Elizabeth Spelman (1989) and Catherine Lutz (1988) took interest in womens emotional lives and labours. While these earlier influences are still resonant, it is only over the last decade that we have witnessed what Woodward (1996), Berlant (1997) and Nicholson (1999) have referred to as an ‘affective turn’. Interestingly, this turn is not specific to cultural studies; it extends into the field of neurology, where writers such as Antonio Damasio (1994, 2003) have reconsidered the connection between emotion and rationality. Other work on emotion and affect, such as Robert Solomons In Defense of Sentimentality (2004) and The Passions: Emotion and the Meaning of Life (1993), Jack Katzs How Emotions Work (1999), Martha Nussbaums Upheavals of Thought (2001), Jenefer Robinsons Deeper Than Reason (2005), David Eng and David Kazanjians On Loss (2003), Brian Massumis Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002), Rei Teradas Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” (2001), Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemerts The New Individualism: The Emotional Costs of Globalisation (2006), to name but a few, illustrate the renewed and continuing interest in this field and its significance within critical theory.

From Old Media Whore to New Media Troll

On the 18 January, 2009, an online pop music fan posted over fifty outtake images from Madonnas photographic shoot for her previously released Hard Candy album. These photos produced a backlash of abuse of the then fifty-year-old Madonna from music fans and can be situated in a wider online discursive sphere of brutal and offensive critique of Madonnas ageing body and femininity in social networking sites such as Facebook, for example. While longevity, experience and wisdom ensure that Madonna continues to be meaningful to nostalgic and new audiences alike, these attributes slide out of view as the focus remains upon her body, its femininity and its ability to ‘pass’ in a youth-centred popular music culture. In the wider context of a cultural, political and industry debate around the practice of releasing pre- and post-airbrushed images, the leaked photos are instrumental (albeit unintentionally) for interrogating the relationship between media and authentic ageing female bodies. This article offers a theoretical analysis of the online discursive (textual and visual) poaching and negotiation of Madonnas image, celebrity and marketing of the ageing female body.

Theorizing Emotion and Affect

Scholars attempting to cover the history of research on emotion often chart a course through work by Aristotle, Baruch Spinoza, Sigmund Freud, and William James. These names become anchoring points in a chronological overview of emotion as a concept. Of course, like all broad-brush attempts to survey such a vast and complicated area, they leave out several other important scholars, such as Adam Smith, David Hume, Silvan S. Tomkins, and Raymond Williams. This chapter is not intended as a history of the concept of emotion. Several books have been written already that successfully move through the theoretical development of the term. Robert C. Solomon’s (2003) What Is an Emotion? Classic and Contemporary Readings ([1984] 2003), for instance, provides an excellent historical overview alongside written work from Aristotle to Martha Nussbaum. The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science (2006) by Daniel M. Gross is a radical reading of similar writers. Jennifer Harding and E. Deidre Pribram’s Emotions: A Cultural Studies Reader (2009) offers recent work within the fields of cultural and critical studies, and Jerome Kagan’s What Is Emotion?: History, Measures and Meanings (2007) charts a sophisticated course through the history of emotion in fields as diverse as anthropology, psychology, and neurobiology.

(Un)fashionable Feminists: The Media and Ally McBeal

Popular representations of feminism in the media sell: whether in music, film or television, images of independent women appeal to a wide audience.1 One has to only look at recent chart hits such as Destiny’s Child’s ‘Independent Woman’ (2000), or Kelly Clarkson’s ‘Miss Independence’ (2003), films such as Charlie’s Angels (2000) or Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), or popular fictions such as Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) to appreciate that women’s ‘liberation’ is a marketable commodity. Throughout these representations it is implied that women have achieved the goals of second wave feminism — financial autonomy, a successful career, sexual freedom — and, therefore, that the demands associated with the movement of the 1970s have been superseded. Indeed, this image is so widely acknowledged that the cover of the 29 June 1998 issue of Time magazine declared feminism to be dead. One rhetorical mechanism through which the media have articulated this distorted perspective is by the construction of a ‘then’ and ‘now’: two distinct feminisms, one representing women ‘today,’ and the other, either labelled ‘second wave’ or ‘seventies’ feminism, depicting feminisms of the past. These two interpretations of feminism are set against each other, with an implication that women have either moved to a less politicised and less effective feminism; or, more generally, that there is no more need for feminism.

‘“The Point of View of Shame”: Re-viewing female desire in Catherine Breillat's Romance (1999) and Anatomy of Hell (2004)’

Abstract This article examines the question of woman in contemporary European cinema through an engagement with post-feminist theory and with French film director Catherine Breillats Romance (1999) and Anatomy of Hell (2004). What comes through recent work within feminist film criticism is a desire to change the conceptual frameworks that have held ‘woman’ in place over the last thirty years. However, this article suggests that doing so needs to involve a reconsideration of concepts such as ‘desire’ and ‘gaze’, instead of moving beyond them. We need to review the way these concepts have been theorised and consider new ways of doing so, particularly through the work of contemporary film makers.

A Sentimental Journey: Television, Meaning and Emotion

If I go to the cinema to watch something and I’ve not been moved ... and laughed out loud, I feel cheated really, to be honest with you, that’s part of the experience of going to the cinema; and also when I’m watching TV, I’m the most greedy television viewer that you can think of, because I want everything, that’s why I write like that, because that’s what I want, I want that journey. (Kay Mellor)

Feeling Northern: ‘heroic women’ in Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley (BBC One, 2014—)

This article analyses a recent television drama written by Sally Wainwright in order to explore notions of Northernness, gender and class. I consider to what extent Wainwright is expanding and revising current perceptions of the North, and more specifically of Northern women, through an analysis of her recent television programme, Happy Valley. Wainwright’s work shares characteristics of the British social realist television drama from the late 50s, early 60s: they have themes of escape, they use location to say something about their characters and they take viewers on an emotional journey that is related to the social conditions they inhabit. And yet, she is also putting women, who were often on the periphery of social drama, in the centre. Wainwright takes her viewers on a journey that begins with the anger and injustice resonant with the male protagonists of social realism, but as women, this anger and injustice is worked through in terms of the family and eventually leads to a greater sense of commitment to community and the place she comes from, which, in Wainwright’s work, is the North. In so doing, she expands the genre and gives it a female voice. She offers us a sense of what ‘feeling’ Northern is to women, as well as men. Additionally, she is a screenwriter who is speaking from the position of the working-class North; she is intimate to these communities, not a ‘detached observer.’ And yet, despite these inroads, her work has only recently received praise from the British television Industry.

‘Walking the line between saint and sinner’ Care and Nurse Jackie

This article considers how the notion of care, whether as an act of kindness or as a moral ethics, is reflected and worked through in the contemporary American television series, Nurse Jackie (2009–2015). Nurse Jackie, a comedy drama set in a fictional Catholic New York City Hospital, explores the ‘line between saint and sinner’, in the life of an emergency room (ER) nurse. This article considers how Jackie’s character negotiates moral boundaries in a way that allows for a reconsideration of both the complexity of care practices in contemporary society and the gendered nature of these practices.

IV. `Why I Love Carmela Soprano': Ambivalence, the Domestic and Televisual Therapy

In The Feminist, the Housewife and the Soap Opera, Charlotte Brunsdon (2000) reminds us that the 1980s gave way to a renewed interest in romance fiction by feminist researchers. Tania Modleski’s (1982) Loving with a Vengeance and Janice Radway’s (1984) Reading the Romance considered the place of romance fiction in women’s lives, while, at the same time, writers such as Dorothy Hobson (1982), Ien Ang (1985) and Terry Lovell (1987) brought new value and understanding to the soap opera genre. Brunsdon proposes a schema of ‘repudiation-reinvestigationrevaluation’ to characterize the relationship ‘between second-wave feminism and mass cultural feminine forms’ (Brunsdon, 2000; 21) and in so doing provides us with a useful framework to think about developments in feminist television criticism. Brunsdon points out that an early feminist interest in these forms can be marked by what she terms ‘repudiation’. She notes that many women felt suspicious about traditional sites of femininity such as cooking, fashion and various kind of home-making while today these interests are being revalued and have led to a renegotiation of domestic pleasures and their relevance to a new generation. Drawing on the secret fantasies of colleagues to bake cakes and stay at home, and the cultural trend of ‘downshifting’, for instance, Joanne Hollows (2006) suggests that a move homewards cannot simply be seen as a regressive side of feminism; rather, it must be reconsidered in light of the inroads that feminism has made. In other words, the fact that women today might choose to stay at home is not a sign of feminism’s failure, but perhaps a sign of its success. As Hollows argues, ‘the meanings of the domestic, and domestic femininities, are contextual and historical and what operates as a site of subordination for some women may operate as the object of fantasy for others’ (Hollows, 2006: 114). Early work on feminine cultural forms, such as the soap opera, has led to a

Single Women in Popular Culture: The Limits of Postfeminism

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