Affect and Embodiment at the Margins in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century American Literature and Culture

Cannell, Elaine; Cannell, Elaine

Striving to tether the abstraction of contemporary affect theory to the material and embodied archive, each of the papers in this panel ask: how do minority and marginalized artists adopt, appropriate, or enact certain aesthetic practices both to leverage affective attunement and (re)gain control over the body? How do the subsequent cultural products capture the relationship between affect and bodily control? To answer these questions, each of our panelists explore how works by minority and marginalized artists challenge normative or normalized structures of embodied feeling.

This panel, like many contemporary interventions in affect studies, has deep interdisciplinary roots in ethnic studies, queer and feminist theory, and cultural studies. By engaging with theories of affect, embodiment, performance, and material history, our panel participates in a larger conversation with work like José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown, Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Jennifer Nash’s Black Feminism Reimagined, Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings, and Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism. Building on this legacy, our panelists interrogate the lived and felt experiences of marginalization—spanning from the everyday to the radical imaginary, from the individual to the collective, and from the ugly to the potentially utopian.

Each of the four panelists will give a 12-15 minute presentation. Professor Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, the presider, will introduce the speakers and facilitate discussion afterward to ensure a productive and timely conversation.

Weishun Lu will begin by establishing the scholarly conversation around the topics of minor feelings and embodiment in affect theory. Her presentation explores how the encounter with texts that supposedly “represent” a minoritized group can elicit feelings of anxiety or awkwardness. These feelings manifest in the body as cringe. She argues that ethnic cringe is a feeling attached to the commodification of race in the age of neoliberal multiculturalism, but at the same time, it can also be re-deployed as a device for affective disidentification. Turning to Ed Bok Lee’s Whorled (2011) and Rane Arroyo’s The Singing Shark (1996), she examines how the feeling of cringe might arise in one’s encounter with representational texts and how minority writers mobilize cringey forms to undermine uncomfortable feelings.

Continuing the discussion on the mobilization of nominally negative feelings, Elaine Cannell will explore the enactment of rage in feminist anti-rape performance art and activism in the 1970s United States. She argues that anti-rape protest and performance reciprocally redeploy the material and affective mediums of gendered violence—including the archetypically harmful and masculine affect of rage—through collective embodied gesture. This presentation places the Combahee River Collective-led protests in response to the 1979 Roxbury murders in conversation with Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz’s 1977 protest-performance In Mourning and in Rage and Ana Mendieta’s 1973 work of body art Untitled (Rape Scene). Cannell contends that the Roxbury protests, In Mourning and In Rage, and Untitled (Rape Scene) utilize embodied and affective gestures to reclaim sites of collective agency and solidarity for feminists of all stripes.

Next, Sofi Chávez will examine a specific embodied practice: tattooing. By examining Tamara Santibañez’s workbook Could this be magic? Tattooing as Liberation Work (2020) Chávez explores how this mixed-genre work, which blends autobiography, “art-book,” oral history, and user-manual, asserts the body as a malleable, living document, thus rendering tattooing a critical practice with which to resignify the body. More specifically, she considers the participatory form of Santibañez’s text, as well as their personal reflections on trauma-informed tattooing, to consider the relationship between form and lived embodiment within queer Latinx aesthetics. In doing so, she considers what attention to the affective world of art-made-flesh can reveal about the evolution of affect studies.

Finally, Nicole Seymour will take us further into examining the affordances of supposedly negative affects. Queer and trans people of color are often burdened with shame and fear in settler-colonial, racist, and homophobic contexts—and rarely granted opportunities to affectively influence others, at least not in meaningful ways. Seymour considers two works that scramble these affective circuits: Black queer author Samantha Irby’s food-centric essay collection Meaty (2013) and Chinese-American nonbinary artist Mary Maggic’s cooking show parody, “Housewives Making Drugs” (2017). Both works center bodily autonomy and flout shame, in opposition to stigmatizing medical discourse and gatekeeping. But they also avoid sentimental triumphalism, preferring to revel in grossness, absurdity, and humor.

At a historical moment when questions of embodiment have never felt more pressing, these panelists hope to foster fresh, materially-grounded dialogue about the connection between marginality, affect, and embodiment.

128 Affect and Embodiment at the Margins in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century American Literature and Culture: Calls for Papers