Marianne Liljeström and Susanna Paasonen (eds) Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Difference

Reviewed by: Anne Graefer, Newcastle University, UK

Working with Affect in Feminist Readings is an important collection issued as a part of the ‘Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism’ series, exploring the role of affect in feminist knowledge production, and particularly in textual methodologies. As Marianne Liljeström and Susanna Paasonen explain in the introduction, this volume expands on an existing body of feminist work that has ‘paid attention to the inseparability of affect and interpretation’ (p. 1) by mapping out new ways for affective reading. The authors in this interdisciplinary collection draw on very different research material, from literary and academic texts to computer games, television series, dance and field notes, developing thereby novel and flexible frameworks that combine studies of affect with more traditional research methods (ethnography, interviews, close reading, narrative and discourse analysis). ‘The researcher’s affective encounter with, and diverse attachments to, the texts in question’ (pp. 5–6) plays a central role in all of the volume’s chapters, enabling the reader to see a number of critically self-reflexive approaches. Anu Koivunen provides, at the beginning of the book, a valuable overview of the different definitions of the ‘affective turn’ within feminist theory which offers the reader necessary background knowledge for the following chapters. She also elaborates on the different intellectual traditions of affect, in which one strand regards affect as synonymous with emotion (or passion), emphasising the social and embodied nature of emotions, whilst the other school of thought follows a Deleuzian approach understanding affect as an extra-discursive and pre-subjective energy which travels free of socio-historical attachments and enables creative difference.

Following this logic, the book is then thematically split into two parts which represent slightly different approaches to affect and feminist reading: Part I, Affective attachments, opens with Sara Ahmed’s discussion of happiness in which she shows how certain objects come to be affective over time. Chapters in this part focus on issues of representation and embodiment (body image, avatar) as well as the power of texts and images to move their viewers in highly bodily ways through affects of laughter, sexual arousal and shame. In her chapter, Susanna Paasonen for instance looks closely at a pornographic image and illustrates how the encounter between the material and semiotic qualities of the image and the body of the viewer engenders complex affective reactions which sometimes escape ‘readerly or visual mastery’ (p. 70). Working with affect, from her perspective, requires accounting ‘for the productivity and specificity of these encounters’ (p. 69). Katariina Kyrölä also thinks through the sensory relationship between media texts and the viewing body by focusing on the affective power of laughter. Her analysis of the television series Fat Actress shows how laughter connects text and body in myriad ways which can enable a shift in how we see ourselves, as well as how we read the text. Chapters in this section highlight, through their affective readings, moments of surprise or contradiction that can arise when we encounter media texts.

Part II, Dynamics of difference, addresses the place and function of affect for feminist readings through various concepts of difference. Just as the heading promises, the section moves through a wide range of conceptual angles. Every chapter addresses difference from a distinctive viewpoint, locating it materially (as geopolitical difference), methodologically (as difference that cannot be grasped in traditional feminist methodologies) or theoretically (some chapters take on a more Deleuzian understanding of difference as immanent and incalculable force). The section opens with a text from Elizabeth Grosz, in which she critiques traditional feminist thinking’s focus on narration, the personal and the individual and suggests a more Deleuzian understanding of ‘pure difference’ (p. 105), material forces and movements. This ontological shift away from the anthropocentric and discursive and towards the non-human and material, orientates the reader towards a new reading of affect. Johanna Ahonen, for instance, reads Indian spirituality through a Deleuzian understanding of becoming, but not all authors in this section use this new ontology – the research topics in this part travel across such diverse fields as Egyptian dance, Indian spirituality, Caribbean novels and post-Soviet academic texts while changing their theoretical and methodological approaches. This invites the reader to think difference in a geopolitical and transnational context, although it is sometimes difficult to understand how the chapters interlink beyond the common goal of establishing new ways of understanding feminist methodology. Part II ends with Melissa Gregg’s chapter ‘Working with affect in the corporate university’, in which she advises academics to recognise their own positioning within this affective economy for the ‘benefit of improving our credibility in attempting to speak of the labor of others’ (p. 190).

Notwithstanding their differences, both parts of this collection aim to map out salient ways of working with affect while emphasising the researcher’s own embodied, located and relational position within research. The collection is well-written and accessible to academics, undergraduate/graduate students and non-academics alike. It is one of the great strengths of this collection that it does not rely on abstract theorisations or stop with the general call to ‘go beyond traditional analyses of texts’, but rather uses concrete examples to demonstrate how affective reading can be done, methodologically and empirically. What might working with affect mean for feminist readings? What kind of knowledge and ethics does it facilitate (p. 2)? These kinds of questions frame the collection as a whole and enable the authors to draw attention to surprising and contradictory moments and undercurrents in media texts, but also to show the possibilities of affect to provide different, and potentially transformative, ways of knowing. Working with Affect in Feminist Readings is a welcome and necessary collection that explains how working with affect can prove extremely productive across a range of disciplines and approaches.