Abstract
Affect, feelings, and emotion have grown and sustained interest among communication scholars studying media, journalism, and strategic communication, to name a few. However, dominant conceptualizations of affect in communication and media studies are often reductive and instrumental, especially in applied and social science traditions, and much ground is left to cover. Feminist affect theory refocuses intellectual thought on representations of and relationships between bodies and affect, interrogating how feelings and emotions operate culturally, socially, and politically. The affective turn is rich in multiplicity of theoretical, methodological, and epistemological commitments with feminist sensibilities that may be illustrative for feminist media scholars. This chapter traces the recent affective turn and proposes avenues for future research on affect in feminist media studies for the twenty-first century.
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Notes
- 1.
Countless scholars have depicted countless genealogies and evolutions of the affective turn and affect theory, and most if not all tell a slightly different story; thus, I believe that, at least for present purposes, Tyler’s dual model of affect theory is as valid and accurate as most others. However, for a more comprehensive mapping of the evolution of affect theory and its many trajectories, see Seigworth and Gregg’s (2010) introduction to The Affect Theory Reader.
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For a recent example from Massumi that demonstrates the political capacity of affect, see his chapter in The Affect Theory Reader (Gregg and Seigworth 2010, 52–70) about the “political ontology of threat.”
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Kennedy, A.K. (2018). The Affective Turn in Feminist Media Studies for the Twenty-First Century. In: Harp, D., Loke, J., Bachmann, I. (eds) Feminist Approaches to Media Theory and Research. Comparative Feminist Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90838-0_5
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