This proposed panel on mobilizing self-indifference considers the affect and politics underlying the subjects’ refusal to engage with the hegemonic structures that shape and influence the world in which one inhabits. Indifference, as an affective force, is an under theorized concept. But indifference and/or apathy to not only the happenings around the individual but also a disengagement with one’s own movement in the world had been an increasing concern since the turn of the twentieth century. With this is mind, this panel poses the questions of how a body is moved to indifference, how indifference circulates on a singular level, as well as how its contagions spread outward from the self-indifferent individual? The idea of divergence, of living in difference to normative and reproductive heterosexual structures, as a mode of queer or feminist resistance is, without question, nothing new. As Judith Halberstam notes in The Queer Art of Failure, “Queer studies offer us one method for imagining, not some fantasy of an elsewhere, but existing alternatives to hegemonic structures” (89). Queer resistant, then, (as has been well-documented via Lee Edelman and others) has a particular temporality that is in direct correlation and tension with hegemony, working to unsettle restrictive knowledge, modes, and systems.While affect is often considered a future-orientated theory in relation to its propensity for engendering “potential liberations, escapes, and freedoms” (Cooppan, “Memory’s Future” 56), to be open to the future is to be vulnerable in the present, not only to potential positive encounters but also harmful or dangerous ones. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari note in A Thousand Plateaus, the lines of affective relations are susceptible to both creation and destruction: “There is a danger that these vibrations traversing us may be aggravated beyond our endurance” (197). But what if encounters of self-destruction, of vibrations traversing us beyond endurance, opened up potentially powerful acts of resistance that could create new modes of being that reject hegemonic social orders.

“Mobilizing Self-indifference” considers the politics of bodies that are affected by aggravation, anxiousness, and unease as they move through the world, and the possibility of how orientations to these affective encounters can be mobilized into self-indifference—thus countering normative prescriptions of life, happiness, and success. In choosing to ignore, displace, or obliterate the aggravations that saturate the lived experience of existing in conflict with dominate social structures, the act of self-indifference reframes the aim of living outside of the pursuit of normative ideals on happiness and success. This may be argued as a privileged cite, in which only certain subjects are afforded the ability to choose self-destruction in the form of self-indifference, regardless of the so-called ruinous outcomes. However, while this is most certainly true, these questions are aimed not in finding the marginal and precarious as a cite for harnessing subversive power, rather it considers the personal radicalism of shifting towards self-indifference to disrupt and displace how society reads the individual. We might see this as, what Judith Halberstam defines, “a radical form of masochistic passivity . . . [which] offers up a critique of the organizing logic of agency and subjectivity”; it “opts out of certain systems” (131). But in indifference, there is no critique or acknowledgment of the hegemonic system that continues to shape and influence the world in which one is pushed to the margins. In indifference there is only refusal to engage. As an act of resistance, self-indifference—in reaction to normative, and even liberal, formulations of the self based on progressive narratives of becoming, advancement, and the pursuit of happiness—instead becomes a rejection of the need for self-preservation under hegemonic social orders. Self-indifference is not a refusal of self or a radical passivity; it is an active removal of the self from the reading of individuals through human essentialism.

The panel will begin with a discussion from Aleksandr Prigozhin onSylvia Townsend Warner’s modernist novel, Summer Will Show (1936). The novel’s ending suggests that joining the cause of revolution requires a renunciation of the self akin to the indifference of nature. Minna’s insufficiently impersonal politics, marked by her Romantic views of nature, gives way to a more detached view. This talk will address this gap by analyzing how detachment from the self facilitates broader political projects of liberation in Summer Will Show. By engaging with the theories of affective detachment articulated by Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai, as well as with those of impersonal intimacy developed by Leo Bersani and Tim Dean, I will argue that the achievement of impersonality and detachment from self is necessary for achieving wider solidarities. Christine Weidner’s paper will follow and considers Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990). Her paper focuses on how Kuerishi’s narrator navigates his own material and affective geographies with an indifferent stance towards the restrictive cultural scripts that become yoked to pre-fabricated, supposedly inflexible identity categories. His type of indifference, far from being apathetic, locates agency in tangled roots. In emphasizing choice through plurality, indifference denies the need for fetishizing singular differences. Indifference refutes such limited forms of social “inclusion” revealing that this “inclusion” is, in fact, a renewed form of exclusion by operating along fossilized cultural and ethnic lines. Celiese Lypka’s discussion on the early works of Jean Rhys (1929-1939) will return to the modernist novel to close out the consideration of self-indifference. Reading the aggravations that traverse the protagonists’ bodies throughout the narrative, this paper focuses on rereading Rhys work with a view to personal indifference that disrupts readings of sadness and darkness that surround the characters. In this way, the unsettling encounters that continue to fascinate Rhys’s readers are reconceived as moments of conscious self-intimacy, allowing Rhysian characters to combat the feminine anxiousness that has restricted their sense of self and continue on in their lives—no matter how harrowing that may be for both the women and the reader. Each discussion will be allotted fifteen minutes and will follow an open question period with the audience for approximately twenty-five minutes.