Sarah Cefai
Feminist Writer | "Aesthetics of Obligation" | Affective Structures of Consent | Medial Misogyny | Hyper-Mediation | Feminist Theory | Affect Studies | Cultural Studies | University of Sydney, LSE & University of Edinburgh Alumna
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‘Exit Wounds of Feminist Theory’ asks how feminist theory, as affective and subjective zoning, creates the vulnerabilities of its bodies (of its writers, of its knowledges, its communities) and imperfectly defends them. Historically, writing has cultivated a ‘heightened awareness of personal physical boundaries and a sense of those boundaries as the vessel of one’s self’ (Carson 1986, 44). If ‘[s]elves are crucial to writers’ (1986, 41), the contemporary moment gives the obverse formulation more airplay; at stake in writing is the self and by extension, the conventions that defend against non-sovereignty (dependency, that which threatens to overwhelm, the innervating outside). If ‘[w]hat is managed in an emotional experience is not an emotion but the self in the feeling that is being felt’ (Denzin 1984, 50), writing is connected to feeling in the play between writing and the self. To go down into the silence and inarticulateness ‘there in the deep structure’ (hooks 1996, 49), is to travel down into the writing, to where what is at stake is felt, to the edging of a self, and feminist theory itself, into and out of existence. To this end, the exit wound offers an image of feminist thought that foregrounds the terms of recognition that seed feminist knowledge.
Julietta Singh describes ‘the body archive’ as an ‘assembly of history’s traces deposited in me’ (2018a, 29). Here, I plumb the body archive of feminist theory by assembling its ‘found exits’. Foregrounding the elsewhere, the feminist scene of exile might offer a force for assembly, which Verónica Gago defines as the ‘concrete place where words cannot be detached from the body’ (2020, 161, emphasis in original). This image of feminist thought hopes to ‘engender “thinking” in thought’ (Deleuze 1994, 147), in feminist philosophy and politics, including the ways in which feminism is lived and understood as ‘a living thing’ (Wiegman 2010, 80). ‘In the end’, writes Singh, ‘we are not bounded, contained subjects, but ones filled up with foreign feelings and vibes that linger and circulate in space, that enter us as we move through our lives. We likewise leave traces of ourselves and our own affective states (which are never really just our own) behind us when we go’ (2018a, 31). ‘Exit Wounds of Feminist Theory’ was written with these traces, in the flight from bruised intentions. Intention means not only (1) a thing intended, and (2) conceptions formed by directing the mind towards an object, but also (3) the healing process of a wound (OED 2020).
The Flood is a story about being caught in a flash flood in a remote part of Australia. The story begins with a sense of knowing what might be there in the story, but also stages an encounter with what is not yet known. Inspired by Haraway and others, I wrote the story in order to participate in a ‘becoming-with’ the story, keeping open the possibility of what other stories this story might have to tell. I began with the proposition that the time of the flood was one of kairos—an event drawn from a more ongoing time (chronos) in which the elements, such as the rain, play a major part. But as time went on, another story came out, which is one of the event of the flood as a time of missing—not as a time of coming together but as one of coming apart. It turns out that what moved in the place was a story about love, humility and gratitude. Further still, a story had to come out about the shame and embarrassment of offending custodial responsibility, and speaking about it. The story reflects themes of ethics, temporality and ontology through various threads of love, and forms part of a broader enquiry into humiliation and the feeling of being obliged. See for example Cefai (2020).
My writing here is experimental and proceeds by way of example, experience, and a weak reference to the “politics of location” (Rich 1986, 210). The dating platform Tinder, in its generation of new aesthetic categories that apparently break with “narrative knowledge and knowledge as narrative,” while purportedly speaking to / seeking out the pleasures and availabilities of sex, lends itself well to a study of the emergent formations of sex with, and without, optimism (Berlant and Edelman 2014, 3). Indeed, whatever our prejudices about the app (and Tinder is ripe for prejudice of all sorts, particularly in its barrage of aesthetic judgements), Tinder’s scenes are at the forefront of transformations in sexual relations. I want to admit, however, that I did not intentionally seek out an object through which to examine how ‘sex’ intensifies “that which is structurally nonsovereign,” or approach Tinder in the cold light of day as an object of research (Berlant and Edelman 2014, 5). Rather, my engagement with Tinder’s emergent textuality is co-incidental to my practice of writing: “notes from the field” just happened. Nonetheless, in having taken up feminist theory as a “movement for change [that] lives in feelings, actions, and words” many years ago, my practice of writing was a priori open to Tinder’s affective circuits (Rich 1986, 223). That is, my practice of writing, like my experience of Tinder, embodies “the constant pressure to adjust that is at the heart of being nonsovereign” (Berlant and Edelman 2014, 6). So, what I have written here occurs from within “structures of digital feeling” and exposes something of “the continuous lines that compose numerous intersecting durations of the experiential” (Seigworth 2015, n.p.). While it’s awfully grand to invoke Michel Foucault in this way, not to mention perplexing (what would he make of Tinder?), I think that not only in writing but in sex too, “one writes to become other than what one is,” and that this formulation of the nonsovereignty of sex and writing expresses an optimism for their forms (Foucault 1985, 104). However, Tinder takes the risks and fallout invited by this nonsovereignty to new proportions. If “[w]hatever circumscribes or mutilates our feelings makes it more difficult to act” (Rich 1986, 223), and if heteronormativity is just such a circumscriber in its “attempts to snuff out libidinal unruliness” (Berlant and Edelman 2014, 4), then my ruminations that follow here—on the theatre, circuits, status and stakes of “sex with optimism”—seek to provoke the “intersecting durations” of these proportions, among other things (Seigworth 2015, n.p.).
possibility and the outcome of convergent lesbian media. The claim is grounded on the
intersection of two major shifts in the publicity of feeling: the civic incorporation of lesbian desire (culminating in legislative equity for lesbian and gay subjects) intersecting with the shift of intimacy from private to public life (epitomised by the elevation of the intimate to a national concern). To understand how the lesbian intimate contributes to and is expressed in the formation of specific convergent media, the article draws on Deleuze’s writing on Spinoza (1988). A Spinozist conception of bodies and images is used to situate and think through The L World’s (Showtime 2004-9) lesbian media milieu as an environment of images that responds to—and is dependent upon its production of—capacities for feeling. In so doing, the article conceptualises lesbian as a mode of affection that modifies bodies as lesbian by modifying their feelings. Here lesbian intimacy is viewed as an effect of the contact between the affective capacity of images to modify viewers’ feelings and the social and cultural legitimacy of lesbian intimacy that arises through the civic incorporation of lesbian desire and the shift toward the intimate in national cultures. This way of viewing intimacy is illustrated through a discussion of the circulation of images in A Photographic Journal by Jennifer Beals (Beals 2010); images that hide (while purporting to show) their material conditions of production by seeking to affect intimate contact between bodies.
‘Exit Wounds of Feminist Theory’ asks how feminist theory, as affective and subjective zoning, creates the vulnerabilities of its bodies (of its writers, of its knowledges, its communities) and imperfectly defends them. Historically, writing has cultivated a ‘heightened awareness of personal physical boundaries and a sense of those boundaries as the vessel of one’s self’ (Carson 1986, 44). If ‘[s]elves are crucial to writers’ (1986, 41), the contemporary moment gives the obverse formulation more airplay; at stake in writing is the self and by extension, the conventions that defend against non-sovereignty (dependency, that which threatens to overwhelm, the innervating outside). If ‘[w]hat is managed in an emotional experience is not an emotion but the self in the feeling that is being felt’ (Denzin 1984, 50), writing is connected to feeling in the play between writing and the self. To go down into the silence and inarticulateness ‘there in the deep structure’ (hooks 1996, 49), is to travel down into the writing, to where what is at stake is felt, to the edging of a self, and feminist theory itself, into and out of existence. To this end, the exit wound offers an image of feminist thought that foregrounds the terms of recognition that seed feminist knowledge.
Julietta Singh describes ‘the body archive’ as an ‘assembly of history’s traces deposited in me’ (2018a, 29). Here, I plumb the body archive of feminist theory by assembling its ‘found exits’. Foregrounding the elsewhere, the feminist scene of exile might offer a force for assembly, which Verónica Gago defines as the ‘concrete place where words cannot be detached from the body’ (2020, 161, emphasis in original). This image of feminist thought hopes to ‘engender “thinking” in thought’ (Deleuze 1994, 147), in feminist philosophy and politics, including the ways in which feminism is lived and understood as ‘a living thing’ (Wiegman 2010, 80). ‘In the end’, writes Singh, ‘we are not bounded, contained subjects, but ones filled up with foreign feelings and vibes that linger and circulate in space, that enter us as we move through our lives. We likewise leave traces of ourselves and our own affective states (which are never really just our own) behind us when we go’ (2018a, 31). ‘Exit Wounds of Feminist Theory’ was written with these traces, in the flight from bruised intentions. Intention means not only (1) a thing intended, and (2) conceptions formed by directing the mind towards an object, but also (3) the healing process of a wound (OED 2020).
The Flood is a story about being caught in a flash flood in a remote part of Australia. The story begins with a sense of knowing what might be there in the story, but also stages an encounter with what is not yet known. Inspired by Haraway and others, I wrote the story in order to participate in a ‘becoming-with’ the story, keeping open the possibility of what other stories this story might have to tell. I began with the proposition that the time of the flood was one of kairos—an event drawn from a more ongoing time (chronos) in which the elements, such as the rain, play a major part. But as time went on, another story came out, which is one of the event of the flood as a time of missing—not as a time of coming together but as one of coming apart. It turns out that what moved in the place was a story about love, humility and gratitude. Further still, a story had to come out about the shame and embarrassment of offending custodial responsibility, and speaking about it. The story reflects themes of ethics, temporality and ontology through various threads of love, and forms part of a broader enquiry into humiliation and the feeling of being obliged. See for example Cefai (2020).
My writing here is experimental and proceeds by way of example, experience, and a weak reference to the “politics of location” (Rich 1986, 210). The dating platform Tinder, in its generation of new aesthetic categories that apparently break with “narrative knowledge and knowledge as narrative,” while purportedly speaking to / seeking out the pleasures and availabilities of sex, lends itself well to a study of the emergent formations of sex with, and without, optimism (Berlant and Edelman 2014, 3). Indeed, whatever our prejudices about the app (and Tinder is ripe for prejudice of all sorts, particularly in its barrage of aesthetic judgements), Tinder’s scenes are at the forefront of transformations in sexual relations. I want to admit, however, that I did not intentionally seek out an object through which to examine how ‘sex’ intensifies “that which is structurally nonsovereign,” or approach Tinder in the cold light of day as an object of research (Berlant and Edelman 2014, 5). Rather, my engagement with Tinder’s emergent textuality is co-incidental to my practice of writing: “notes from the field” just happened. Nonetheless, in having taken up feminist theory as a “movement for change [that] lives in feelings, actions, and words” many years ago, my practice of writing was a priori open to Tinder’s affective circuits (Rich 1986, 223). That is, my practice of writing, like my experience of Tinder, embodies “the constant pressure to adjust that is at the heart of being nonsovereign” (Berlant and Edelman 2014, 6). So, what I have written here occurs from within “structures of digital feeling” and exposes something of “the continuous lines that compose numerous intersecting durations of the experiential” (Seigworth 2015, n.p.). While it’s awfully grand to invoke Michel Foucault in this way, not to mention perplexing (what would he make of Tinder?), I think that not only in writing but in sex too, “one writes to become other than what one is,” and that this formulation of the nonsovereignty of sex and writing expresses an optimism for their forms (Foucault 1985, 104). However, Tinder takes the risks and fallout invited by this nonsovereignty to new proportions. If “[w]hatever circumscribes or mutilates our feelings makes it more difficult to act” (Rich 1986, 223), and if heteronormativity is just such a circumscriber in its “attempts to snuff out libidinal unruliness” (Berlant and Edelman 2014, 4), then my ruminations that follow here—on the theatre, circuits, status and stakes of “sex with optimism”—seek to provoke the “intersecting durations” of these proportions, among other things (Seigworth 2015, n.p.).
possibility and the outcome of convergent lesbian media. The claim is grounded on the
intersection of two major shifts in the publicity of feeling: the civic incorporation of lesbian desire (culminating in legislative equity for lesbian and gay subjects) intersecting with the shift of intimacy from private to public life (epitomised by the elevation of the intimate to a national concern). To understand how the lesbian intimate contributes to and is expressed in the formation of specific convergent media, the article draws on Deleuze’s writing on Spinoza (1988). A Spinozist conception of bodies and images is used to situate and think through The L World’s (Showtime 2004-9) lesbian media milieu as an environment of images that responds to—and is dependent upon its production of—capacities for feeling. In so doing, the article conceptualises lesbian as a mode of affection that modifies bodies as lesbian by modifying their feelings. Here lesbian intimacy is viewed as an effect of the contact between the affective capacity of images to modify viewers’ feelings and the social and cultural legitimacy of lesbian intimacy that arises through the civic incorporation of lesbian desire and the shift toward the intimate in national cultures. This way of viewing intimacy is illustrated through a discussion of the circulation of images in A Photographic Journal by Jennifer Beals (Beals 2010); images that hide (while purporting to show) their material conditions of production by seeking to affect intimate contact between bodies.
reframing ‘social problems’ as problems of feeling? In the
Northern Territory, the political discourse on ‘social
problems’, such as the prevalence of criminal offences
involving alcohol, is commonplace in representations of
Aboriginal Australia. This political discourse problematises
Indigenous, alcohol-related crime, by measuring the
success or failure of state sponsored intervention. This
paper argues that this discourse fundamentally
misrepresents the ‘social problem’ of the Aboriginal
consumption of alcohol because it averts the existence of
feelings. Further, I claim that the aversion of (and to)
feeling is embedded in the politics of race in the
Australian imaginary. In order to understand how the
discourse on ‘social problems’ functions, I draw attention
to what I call the ‘institutionalisation of feeling’ and the
‘racialisation of feeling’. Drawing on examples from
policy, political talk, and academic representation, I
endeavour to show how the institutionalisation and
racialisation of feeling are interconnected processes that
colour multiple aspects of Aboriginal contact with the law.
I therefore contend that what is at stake in reframing
‘social problems’ as problems of feeling is the capacity to
critically analyse the social construction of racist thought.
This is student work that may be of interest to students working on these topics.
Introduction
- reflections on feeling and the mind/body distinction, with which we're now overly familiar.
- within the feminist literature, the discussion on "pain" and "shame" stand out as feminist theories that avow feeling as a kind of "embodied knowledge"; shame and pain are linked to feminist critiques of subjectification (gender as a "truth effect" of knowledge/power).
1. Experiencing Feeling, Knowing Experience
- discussion of Scott's critique of "experience" and how this creates obstacles to thinking about feeling from a feminist theoretical perspective.
- part of the problematic is "objectivity" linked to Western subjectivity - Haraway's partial perspective offers more possibility for theorising feeling that Butler/Scott's "discursive" approach.
2. Ontologising Epistemology
- discussion of how Probyn's description of experience as primarily ontological opens up ways to critically think about feeling - this approach captures the role of the ontological dimension in what makes experience meaningful. Something like, feminism needs to be more ontological in its politics, and this is what the question of "feeling" theorised from the vantage point of feminist theory raises.
- draw on Grosz, Kirby and others to show the limits of Butler's framework particularly in this regard.
3. Feeling Knowing Pain, Language and the Body
- a sort of case study of 'pain' as a feminist theory of feeling.
- pain is understood as that which is not represented/representable (Elaine Scarry), hence questions of pain are allied to those of the 'feminine' or patriarchal gender representation more broadly. Questions of pain are then linked to 'gender' more specifically given the social production of sexual difference through the asymmetrical experience of pain.
- pain is linked to the demand for testimony, which is also a feminist thematic, and the work that feminist theory can do.
- there are also some issues here in relation to modes of representation i.e. language versus visibility, and the poetic.
4. Intensity and Knowing Feelings (shame)
- a sort of case study of 'shame' as a feminist theory of feeling.
- shame 'resists' interpretation and yet is highly social in a way that invokes the formation of subjectivity quite differently to 'pain'. (Shame is full of communication.) Yet we couldn't say that one feeling is more of the body than another.
- shame is about the alignment between bodily and social boundaries, which from a feminist theoretical perspective is about the consecration of 'society' (as hetero-patriarchal).
- does shame really resolve the mind/body dualism, or is shame an articulation?
Conclusion
- self-reflexivity doesn't help us much when it comes to 'responsible knowledge' and the avowal of relations of power - a reflexive approach to 'feeling' doesn't in any way avow the relations of power that shape the context in which this reflexivity appears (what Wiegman would call ‘the crucial difference between a field’s discourse of the political and the operations of the political that constitute it’ (2012: 17)).
References