Drawing insight from queer and media studies, this article analyses data from the UK study Adults’ Media Lives. The authors claim that this study reveals the significance of people’s intimate relationships to their media practices, highlighting in particular how people’s media practices mediate the ‘presence’ of others. The authors put forward the concept of mediated intimacy to capture both the cultural intimacy people have with media and the mediation of intimacy by media practices. Mediating intimacy has implications for normative conceptions of intimate life, including the significance of ‘time’ to the values of ‘home’ and ‘work’.

This article seeks to understand the production of lesbian space in the TV series The L Word (TLW) (Showtime 2004(Showtime -2009. To do so, it departs from theories of the lesbian gaze to discuss the visibility of feeling. Specifically, I consider how TLW represents the visibility of feeling as constitutive of lesbian bodies, communities, and spaces. In TLW real spaces (actual locations) fold into virtual ones (on screen) in a deliberate construction of televisual lesbian space. TLW implicitly reflects and is embedded within real-life configurations of lesbian space. I identify four excerpts from the series -'gay LA', 'the pool', 'Olivia cruise', and 'High Art' -that problematise lesbian visibility by foregrounding the relationship between feeling and place. Permission to feel, represented as permission to look, reproduces community as the threshold of lesbian identity. Critical to understanding this production of lesbian space is the way in which TLW associates feeling with social relationships as vividly depicted by 'the chart', a representational motif that maps lesbian sexual relations and the intelligibility of lesbian feeling. Finally, I develop my account of lesbian visibility through the example of the facial expression of feeling, at once a demonstration of the visible embodiment of lesbian feeling, and the intelligibility of lesbian space.

is a Lecturer in Communications and Media. She has previously taught media, communications and cultural studies at the University of Surrey and LSE. Sarah was awarded her PhD by the University of Sydney in Gender and Cultural Studies (2012) and has published in the areas of feminist and queer theory, affect and cultural studies. INTRODUCTION: Mediating affect This Special Issue brings together seven affective mediations on the theme of mediating affect. The articles were presented in an earlier form at the inaugural Affect Theory Conference, held in Millersville (USA) in October 2015. Responding to a Call for Papers, authors were invited to take on the question of 'media' and 'mediation' in the context of the blossoming field of affect studies. Each article in turn tackles a particular trajectory of concern examined as a multiplicity-the philosophy/study of living and feeling, fear and the amplification of affect, trauma and absence, detention and compassion, memorialization and shōjo (少女) (the girl trope in postwar Japanese cinema), whiteness and the good life. The theoretical, disciplinary and cultural lineages are many. Developed together within the context of the project of cultural studies, the resulting Special Issue provides an opportunity to consider more deeply how 'media-world assemblages' (Murphie 2017) give rise to certain political and ethical questions. In this Issue, we encounter six different media-world formations and learn how they shift as they pulsate with affective relations. As well as introducing these relations, this Introduction canvases some of the conceptual work that has gone into 'mediating affect', addressing the context that underpins this bringing together of terms and seeking out ways of provoking further research.

This article proposes that whiteness should be thought as an affective structure. It draws together ideas from cultural studies, cultural anthropology and critical Indigenous studies to theorize whiteness in terms of optimism, possessive subjectivity and multiculturalism. The first section of the article shows how the optimism of ‘the good life’ (Berlant 2011) is linked structurally to whiteness in the construction of the Australian nation-state. Within this context, I introduce Utopia (2013). Made by the journalist and documentary film maker John Pilger, Utopia specifically identifies whiteness as an affective structure. The following sections of the article unpack this claim. First, I consider how the affective structure of the Australian nation-state is encountered through the mutual mediation of ‘media’ and ‘place’. I focus on the example of the film’s journey to Rottnest Island—formerly an island prison, now the destination of holiday makers—to highlight how the optimism of arrival links whiteness to the present. Second, I develop an analysis of the affective ‘surfaces’ (Probyn 1996) of whiteness by analyzing the film’s encounter with ‘White Man faciality’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) and Indigenous ‘slow death’ (Berlant 2011). Through producing a series of faces, Utopia portrays whiteness as a deflective surface that propagates the ‘onto-pathology’ of white Australia (Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos 2014). Utopia also portrays whiteness as an absorptive surface in which Aboriginal self-possession—including, in the form of life—disappears. The film emphasizes the loss of Aboriginal life through illness and suicide linked to incarceration, overcrowding, and state led impoverishment. The article concludes by locating media (including Utopia) within the tension between absorption and deflection as a tension between the different spatial actions of affective relations that mediate whiteness

Articles in this themed section offer critical engagement with globalised flows of cultural practice and the resultant formations of identity that manifest (in) transnational and national contexts of place. This Introduction outlines a rationale for thinking about the particular matter of style as an articulation of structures of desire.In their discussion of style these articles register on-going changes in the global order of desire, evident through the marketisation of desire and its attendant inscription of the political conditions of subjectivity. The disciplinary manifestation of the shift to the 'more-than-human' as a pinnacle of postmodern, globalised relations between identity, economy and place presents a new threshold for gender and cultural studies scholarship. Through their study of cultural objects as diverse as fish, femme and feeling, authors problematise the relationship between cartographies of belonging and the force of the nation in the marketisation of desire.