Feeling Down, Backward, and Machinic: Queer Theory and the Affective Turn

Abstract

The engagement of queer theory with the affective turn, particularly in its divergence from the previous discussions preoccupied with the historical development and poststructuralist critique of sexual identity, has generated three distinct yet related strains of affective scholarship: queer negativity, queer temporality, and queer as machinic body. Each of the strains has raises different analytical challenges and potentials for both queer theory and affect theory, which I term respectively feeling down, feeling backward, and feeling machinic. These three types of scholarship describe the varied forms of sociality and levels of intensity that the queer body is affected by and bring three particular contributions to queer theory, including deepening the understanding of cultural processes, shifting epistemology at the temporal scale, and widening sexual ontology beyond its spatial privileging of the Euro-American experience.

Feeling good mother/father and other regimes. LGBT people’s emotions and parenthoods

“…Emotional meaning is an object of conflict that can be approached from the conception of otherness through dialogic processes, where struggles for emotional meanings (e.g., the subversive use of the phrases gay pride/gay shame) can open paths to achieve more just societies through the political strand of the demand/demand for dignity based on what Crespo (2018) posits as a cultivated sentimentality. Society needs to be aware of the kind of bonds that keep us as worthy members of a society and the performative effect of our emotional demands (Crespo, 2018;Liu, 2020).…”

The coloniality of queer theory: The effects of “homonormativity” on transnational Taiwan’s path to equality

“…“Radical queer temporality” became colonial while its deployment of the symbolic and affective orders was unconsciously othering Asian and Southern queers as backward, ungrievable, and conservative. Love (2009) has argued that endless futuristic queer desires come at the cost of forgetting and “backwarding” the underprivileged groups (such as queers of color, sexual “perverts,” and gender transgressors) who are currently battling with daily difficulties to access progress and the promised future (Liu, 2020: 10). Queer radicalism becomes complicit of American imperial epistemology and the “empire of critique” (Atshan, 2020) while its futurism consistently backwards subalterns with its rhetoric of post, after, and beyond.…”

“…How can we decolonize queer theory? My inquiries of colonial effects include the queer affects (the politics of feeling) that Liu (2020) typologizes as queer temporality ( feeling backward ).…”

Geographies of Fashion and Style: Setting the Scene

“…Through attention to the sensuous and olfactory dimensions of smoking attire, Marković gestures at the bridging of affect theory with queer theory-a turn which substituted the deconstructive and linguistically oriented projects typical of early queer theories, with, for example, the sensorial aspects of fashion photography as fertile grounds "for investigating queer world-making in action" (Filippello 2018, 135), or with radical esthetic practices of "fabulousness" as a way of contesting the everyday marginalization of racialized and sexualized identities (Moore 2018). The turn to queer affect, has moreover, engendered a more explicit engagement with the somatic and the biological, whereby theorists have rejected the queer body as a singular, organic entity (Liu 2020). Speaking to this concern, Sage Brice's article adopts the unique mode of fashion diary work to disrupt the status of the individual, prompting us to instead consider how such a figure is always in a state of becoming.…”