Graduate Journal of Social Science

Articles

• Affect and Sociology: Reflection and Exploration through a Study of Media and Gender in Urban China

  Eva Cheuk Yin Li

  • Abstract

    This paper aims to explore how affect can be registered to the interests of sociological research. It investigates how affect can be operationalised in empirical studies through a review of existing sociological literature, and illustrates the arguments made with ongoing research on zhongxing (neutral sex and/ or gender) sensibility in urban China. I illustrate how social sciences literature attempts to operationalise affect and how sociological literature in the sociology of emotion and the sociology of the body has addressed the corporeal and the emerging. This paper concludes that affect may provide an additional lens to sociological research, but, when appreciating the insights of affect, we should not abandon the established concepts and paradigms of sociology as a discipline.

    Keywords

    Affect, Feeling, Symbolic Interactionism, Zhongxing, Neutral Sex/Gender, Chinese Popular Culture

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  • pp. 16–37

• The Emergent Political: Affective Social Transformation in Two-Spirit, Queer and Trans People of Colour Media

  Anabel Khoo

  • No abstract available.
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  • pp. 38–46

• DISTITLED: Queering Identity, Shame and Community

  Slavco Dimitrov

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  • pp. 47–76

• Mapping the Affective Production of Cybersex: Notes for a Framework

  Trina Joyce Sajo

  • Abstract

    In this piece I sketch out a framework for examining Filipino cybersex using perspectives on affect. I discuss theories of affect that are most relevant to my project. Second, I trace intersecting discourses that mediate the phenomenon. I then outline the contours of this framework. In the concluding section, I reflect on the meaning and value of approaching cybersex as affective production.

    Keywords

    Filipino, cybersex, Affect, labour, production

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  • pp. 77–92

• Vacillations of Affect: How to Reclaim ‘Affect’ for a Feminist-Materialist Critique of Capitalist Social Relations?

  Svenja Bromberg

  • Abstract

    In this paper, I elaborate on the value of the notion of affect and the related concept of affective labour for a feminist-materialist critique. The core argument is that an affective conception of the relationship between subject and structure would allow for a constructive intervention into the definition of ‘materialism’ that builds the ground for any critical social theory, but remains unfinished in the Marxist tradition. For that purpose, it will however be necessary to develop the concept of affect beyond the common, decidedly a-political interpretations that are part of the New Materialist Feminism, as well as beyond the overly emphatic connotations that the post-Workerist tradition has attached to it with regards to its immeasurable characteristic that might allow for the creation a noncapitalist future from within our present.

    Keywords

    Affective labour, materialist feminism, subjectivity, measure, Post-Marxism

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  • pp. 93–119

• Wester Media as ‘Technology of Affect’: The Affective Making of the Angry Arab Man

  Sabiha Allouche

  • Abstract

    This paper works through the framework of affect theory in order to show how Western media and foreign policy contribute towards the intensification of the stereotype of the ‘Angry Arab Man’. It follows the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on affect in order to show how a ‘refrain’ or stereotype emerges. In addition to arguing that Western media acts as technology of affect, this paper shows the emotive component of the interplay between Western media, foreign policy, and their audiences. It challenges the autonomous and pre-cognitive aspects of affect, and draws on feminist and postcolonial scholars in an attempt to reinsert the ‘social’ into debates about affect theory.

    Keywords

    Affect, technology, media, stereotype, Arab, emotions

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  • pp. 120–142

Book Reviews

• Depression: A Public Feeling by Ann Cvetkovich

  Whitney Stark

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  • pp. 143–147

• Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect by Mel Y. Chen

  Katie E. Wetzel

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  • pp. 148–150

• Conference Proceedings Review — Encounters with Vulnerability: The victim, the fragile, the monster, the queer, the abject, the nomadic, the feminine, the shameful, and the rest …

  Nayeli Urquiza Haas and Arturo Sánchez García

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  • pp. 151–161