Suchergebnisse

In Depression: A Public Feeling, Ann Cvetkovich combines memoir and critical essay in search of ways of writing about depression as a cultural and political phenomenon that offer alternatives to medical models. She describes her own experience of the professional pressures, creative anxiety, and political hopelessness that led to intellectual blockage while she was finishing her dissertation and writing her first book. Building on the insights of the memoir, in the critical essay she considers the idea that feeling bad constitutes the lived experience of neoliberal capitalism. Cvetkovich draws on an unusual archive, including accounts of early Christian acedia and spiritual despair, texts connecting the histories of slavery and colonialism with their violent present-day legacies, and utopian spaces created from lesbian feminist practices of crafting. She herself seeks to craft a queer cultural analysis that accounts for depression as a historical category, a felt experience, and a point of entry into discussions about theory, contemporary culture, and everyday life. Depression: A Public Feeling suggests that utopian visions can reside in daily habits and practices, such as writing and yoga, and it highlights the centrality of somatic and felt experience to political activism and social transformation.

Ulrike Müller's Herstory Inventory (HI) is a collection of over one hundred works on paper by "feminist" artists who were given "drawing assignments" that began with textual prompts taken from an archival list of T-shirts that Müller discovered in the collections of the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA). HI has also had multiple incarnations as a staged reading/live performance, audio installation, collective art project, art exhibition, and book, and its relay across media participates in a fascination with the archive that has pervaded LGBTQ culture, resulting in a proliferation of new archives that is one manifestation of the "archival turn." This essay focuses on how Müller's HI uses the LHA as a point of departure for a creative practice that not only opens lesbian feminist archives to new visibility and new publics but also creates a transgenerational dialogue around lesbian feminist politics and representation — both honoring and reviving its history and subjecting it to critique. HI's engagement with the LHA's lesbian feminist commitment to archival autonomy provides an interesting case history for radical archival politics, as tensions between counterarchives and archival critique get played out through the tensions between lesbian and queer feminisms. Returning to the politics of representation and visibility that have been so central and vexing in lesbian feminism, HI puts art practices in conversation with archival ones. The project approaches the archive through abstraction and drawing, both practices of representation that resist the realisms of documentary media such as film and photography, to enact a queer politics of visibility.

This article explores loneliness as the affective life of settler colonialism through the work of queer Indigenous (Driftpile Cree) writer Billy-Ray Belcourt's two volumes of poetry This Wound Is a World and NDN Coping Mechanisms. In particular, the article focuses on how Belcourt draws on queer affect theory and critical race theory in the work of scholars such as Jose Muñoz, Leo Bersani, Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich, Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe – as he explores the relation between sex and death, and between cruising cultures and the ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples. It argues that Belcourt's innovative fusion of poetry and theory provides new genres for racialised understandings of loneliness and other structures of feeling.

Focusing in particular on how affect theory has been informed by art practice, this article develops the concept of the "sovereignty of the senses" through queer and feminist installation projects by Rachael Shannon and Zoe Leonard, as well as Alison Bechdel's account of retreat from the social in her graphic narrative memoir Are You My Mother? (2012). Aiming to articulate notions of sovereignty, democracy, and freedom in affective and sensory terms, it conceives of sovereignty as an embodied practice and something that must be learned and experienced collectively over time rather than a fixed condition of a discrete individual or nation. It explores tensions between Indigenous notions of sovereignty and queer notions of the antisocial or non-sovereign, as well as recent discussions of the commons as an affective category, to offer an anti-racist and decolonial account of queer feminist affect theory and cultural politics.

What if depression, in the Americas at least, could be traced to histories of colonialism, genocide, slavery, exclusion, and everyday segregation and isolation that haunt all of our lives, rather than to biochemical imbalances? This article seeks alternatives to the medical model found in most depression memoirs by considering how the epistemological and methodological struggles faced by a scholar of the African diaspora confronted by the absent archive of slavery are relevant to discussions of political depression. Combining scholarly investigation and personal memoir, Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother exemplifies feminism's affective turn not only by bringing personal narrative into scholarship, but by seeking reparation for the past in the affective dynamics of cultural memory rather than in legal reform or state recognition. Stubbornly refusing to find solace in an African past before slavery, though, Hartman provides a model of emotional reparation in which feelings of loss and alienation persist. Her work suggests the relevance of political depression to both the ordinary life of racism and to what gets called clinical depression.

Ann Cvetkovich Ann Cvetkovich is a professor of English and women's and gender studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author ofMixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism(1992) and An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (2003). She is currently associate editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.Lisa Kessler is an independent editorial and documentary photographer in Boston as well as a teacher of photography at Northeastern University and the Maine Photo Workshops. She received the 2004 Honorable Mention from the Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman Foundation First Book Prize in Photography for her project"Heart in the Wound: Sexual Abuse from the Catholic Church to Civil Society" and the Award of Excellence from the 2002 Pictures of the Year International competition.

The GLQ Gallery features Allyson Mitchell's 2010 installation for the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, A Girl's Journey into the Well of Forbidden Knowledge. In a plus-sized version of a sculpture gallery, two large ladies, in luminescent gold and silver, face two walls of books, attached to each other and to a giant crochet brain overhead by a crochet rope that links their crotches to the brain. Mitchell recreated a version of the Lesbian Herstory Archives reading room in Brooklyn by covering the walls of the gallery with trompe l'oeil wallpaper made from drawings of the books on the shelves. In addition to photographs of the installation, the GLQ Gallery features examples of Mitchell's original drawings.
In a brief commentary on the installation, Ann Cvetkovich discusses how Mitchell brings lesbian feminist history and culture to a larger public and creates an "archive of feelings" through the affective labor of redrawing the Lesbian Herstory Archives shelves. The Gallery also features Mitchell's Deep Lez I statement, a manifesto that calls for a return to lesbian feminist culture as a resource for contemporary queer cultures.