A lot has happened since notions of affect first emerged as a theoretical concept and took hold across the humanities and social sciences. The contours of what was then still confidently called Theory have blurred, morphed into something else, or vanished from sight. The political horizons of the 1990s and 2000s—the time when affect marked its most forceful interventions within theoretical discourse—look very different now, at least to many. The series „After Affects, Future Feelings“ sets out to reflect on these changes, both regarding theoretical developments and their very own structures of feeling, i.e. their shifting material and geographical conditions.
Do you recall your first encounter with affect as a theoretical concept? Looking back, how would you describe your engagement with the term, and what did you see as the promise of affect?
First, let me say thank you for inviting me to be in conversation for this important set of interventions on the past, present, and future importance of affect.
I came to affect theory in the early 2000s. In Europe, affect theory was already familiar to me through feminist Deleuzians like Rosi Braidotti, who made a strong case for the limited intellectual, political, and embodied value of poststructuralist analysis. In the US, the roots were similarly Deleuzian but less focused at the time on what came to be known as post humanism. I was intrigued by the passion for “more than” that an affective commitment demonstrated—more than the categorical, more than identity, more than analysis—but irritated by the tendency to over-invest in the straw figures it castigated. My own background in feminist, queer, and postcolonial thinking took me a different route. On the one hand, it made me suspicious of claims that poststructuralism—or broader paranoid thinking, following Eve Sedgwick—is guilty as charged. For affect theory to be able to rescue knowledge and social justice from the constraining ills of paranoid epistemology, the history of poststructuralism (and indeed materialism) needed to be rewritten without their feminist, black, queer contributors. I just didn’t recognise that poststructuralism, that I could see being made before my eyes into a white, male legacy in order that difference be located in the present. On the other hand, I was somewhat taken aback by the claims for affect’s radicalism, too: the idea that affect would be able to free thinkers from the constraints of the categorical (real or imagined) and that its promise was for knowledge or experience outside the social. I just didn’t buy it. I still don’t. There can be no shortcut to the painstaking work of trying to understand the multiple ways that affect works: sometimes challenging dominant norms, but also very often reinstantiating them. These thoughts were the driving force behind my article “Invoking Affect” from 2005, which was so unpopular with peer reviewers when I first sent it out that it took two years to find a journal that would publish it!
Your work was very instructive for the development and formation of the broader field of Affect Studies. Then we first started our work here at the research centre Affective Societies in 2015, especially your paper on “Affective Solidarity” was an important touchstone, since it brought a feminist tradition of theoretical engagement with feeling and situatedness to the fore, and at the same time articulated a nuanced critique of certain strands of affect studies as well. Revisiting this paper, as you did at the centre’s conference in 2025, how would you describe the context or constellation from which it emerged? What were the main points you wanted to get across regarding affect?
So despite my misgivings in “Invoking Affect” about the teleological instantiations of what was starting to be called the “affective turn,” I never turned away from the importance of affect itself. The final chapter of my book Why Stories Matter is concentrated on the limits of empathy as the basis for queer feminist social justice. It experiments with what it would mean to start from the negative affects of horror and disgust to think temporality and relationality differently. I start from moments where the unspeakability of affect governs how “we” are expected to relate to others. Instead I map what histories of feminist thinking—white, Western, gender-conforming—are produced when these affects are assumed to be shared, and what ask what it might mean to imagine oneself the object of another’s knowing gaze, the inheriter of a history of othering.
The work in that chapter marked the beginning of my interest in what I came to think of as “affective dissonance,” where I extended my dissatisfaction in a feminist reliance on teleologies of social justice that propose empathy as the means to overcome “difference.” I was in search of a theory of solidarity that did not assume a particular endpoint, or a particular subject—feminist or otherwise—of that aim. That work took me back to feminist standpoint theory, as I sought to re-emphasise its focus on knowledge as formed in struggle, and on the importance of individual and collective dissonance as a judgment of (rather than only a disaffection from) dominant ways of knowing. While sometimes experience of that dissonance might redouble efforts towards respectability and recognition, at other times it is the spur to politicisation. From this perspective, for example, it is not the difference between woman and feminist that “affective dissonance” describes, but a prior moment of something like the gendered uncanny: affective dissonance thus is a necessary but not sufficient condition for that movement.
In my work to revisit “affective dissonance,” I am interested in extending this analysis to more fully flesh out the questions I raised there, and in particularly towards a theory of affective solidarity that does not rely on identity-based understandings of difference. My focus thus far has been on the temporality of affective dissonance, starting with that feeling of vertigo that comes with the flash of insight that dominant social interests are not ours, and can never be. A horror plot if you like, where what happens next is key. Do you reaffirm the dominant—for example, conventional understandings of womanhood—or allow vertiginous judgment to allow a radical unravelling of what you thought you knew about who you and others were, who you and others are, and who you and others might become? This then is to insist that the central preoccupation of feminist standpoint is with the difference between woman and feminist where these are always understood to be in tension, and not in necessary teleological relation. To struggle then to keep “the feminist” alive requires struggling in the scenes where “woman” keeps pulling her back in (certainly in the present moment of feminist politics in the UK). Affective solidarity might thus be the refusal to relinquish that struggle, an insistence on the recognition and displacement—always failed—of privilege, as the motor of transformation. Perhaps too, it is a way of describing the temporality of feminist standpoint struggle itself: as a non-innocent, non-identitarian, embodied struggle that requires an effort time after time to turn away from the centre in order to have a glimmer of possibility of imagining becoming the author of one’s own life in a world worth that labour.
How would you describe the discussion that has developed since the first conjuncture of affect? How has your own engagement with the term changed over time? And how would you describe the broader development of the field and its current state?
While I was never in favour of reading epistemology against ontology in ways affect theorists have tended to, I have nevertheless been persuaded by its authors’ commitment to political thinking beyond identity politics. And in fact, these stand-offs are not really so resonant currently, with writers being less concerned it seems with the precise differences between emotion, feeling, and affect, and more with the relationship between affect and the big questions of our time. We have thinkers like Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant to thank for that, since both of them identified the difference between theories of affect as considerably less interesting than the uses affect might be put to in understanding the world as it is, and in imagining it otherwise. And perhaps the resurgence of interdisciplinary interest in social reproduction and in queer materialism has also given renewed attention to older meanings of affect from feminist economics, such as “affective labour.” It would be impossible to take these approaches seriously and retain an understanding of affect as moving us wholly out of the social structures of family, sexuality, migration, and neoliberalism, in other words. I’m thinking here of the important work on trans* materialism that centres the heightened importance of gender binary reproductive labour in contexts of global precarity (Clochec; Caselles; Raha and van der Drift), and the work on migrant and precarious sexual economies underpinned by affective labour of a variety of kinds (Lem).
Currently, affect theory also finds itself confronting the double bind that psychoanalytic understandings of affect have long pointed to: that affect might be the motor for more than one attachment, or that one feeling may mask or carry another. Affect can be the basis of nationalist, even fascist, belonging, even while it can be the basis of transnational solidarities on the Left. A feeling of fear might mask aggression, hate substitute for disappointment, and so on. That’s no surprise, but it points to the particular difficulties that we are facing globally right now: when claims to a vulnerability that needs addressing are almost universal across the spectrum, and where pointing to empirical evidence to counter some of those claims seems to have little effect. I am thinking here of the feelings anti-trans activists mobilise (whether cynically or from commitment) through the trope of the sexually vulnerable woman (Tudor; Lamble), that are imperviousness to evidence of who the main agents of sexual violence are (men born men as always). And of the horror of anti-gender violence globally that, as Judith Butler points out, has a psycho-social life based in real or imagined trauma. And it’s hard to imagine any more stark example of the centrality of trauma to contemporary politics than its wielding as a justification for genocide by the Israeli state against the Palestinian people.
What could the promise of affect be in the future?
Thinking about the above reflections, it is clear that affect theory is essential for being able to engage the present. It is central to economic and political life and to social structures of family and nation. But just as these structures are underpinned by affective labour and affective attachment of all kinds, so too they are vulnerable to affective resonances of a different kind. If affect is the lifeblood of populism, of the securitised nation state and of right-wing transnationalism, it is also central to alternative imaginaries, to what it is that keeps people committed to other values and possibilities. My own engagement with affective dissonance is part of an attempt to develop methodologies that draw on older transnational feminist insistence on solidarity across borders of all kinds, an attempt to think about affect as inaugurating disappointment with the status quo and a life-long commitment to the difficult task of undoing privilege. So too, many other people are engaged in this task of harnessing affect—and its theories—for generating possibilities beyond those that foster hatred for difference and values beyond racial capitalist gain. I’m thinking here of the work of Yasmin Gunaratnam, who calls for an affective methodology for the social sciences that refuses its colonial histories and directly faces (up to) the violence in Palestine. And Billy Holzberg ends his own interview on affect for this blog by stating his commitment to the “queer utopian, abolitionist, and speculative work that insists on more expansive desires and world-making practices.”
References
Ahmed, Sara (2004). Affective economies. Social Text, 22(2), 117–139. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-22-2_79-117
Berlant, Lauren (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press.
Braidotti, Rosi (2001). Becoming-woman: Rethinking the positivity of difference. In Carolyn G. Heilbrun & Nancy K. Miller (Eds.), Feminist consequences: Theory for the new century (pp. 381–413). Columbia University Press.
Clochec, Pauline (2021). Matérialismes trans. Hystériques & AssociéEs.
Gunaratnam, Yasmin (2025). Explosive legacies: Gaza and colonial aphasia. The Sociological Review, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261251333918
Hemmings, Clare (2005). Invoking affect: Cultural theory and the ontological turn. Cultural Studies, 19(5), 548–567. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380500365473
Hemmings, Clare (2011). Why stories matter: The political grammar of feminist theory. Duke University Press.
Hemmings, Clare (2012). Affective solidarity: Feminist reflexivity and political transformation. Feminist Theory, 13(2), 147–161. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700112442643
Lamble, S. (2026). Carceral diagonalism: The punitive safety politics linking left and right transnational anti-gender mobilisations. In Clare Hemmings & Sumi Madhok (Eds.), Transnational anti-gender politics and resistance. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Spring issue.
Lem, Winnie (2022). Migration, “affective” labour and capitalist reproduction. In Sharryn Kasmir & Lesley Gill (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of the anthropology of labor (pp. 295–307). Routledge.
Llaveria Caselles, Eric (2024). Contours of a historical materialist theory of transsexuality: Claiming a hopeful origin story as a personal and political necessity. Transgender Studies Quarterly, 11(2), 239–265. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-11215483
Raha, Nat, & Van Der Drift, Mijke (2024). Trans femme futures: Abolitionist ethics for transfeminist worlds. Pluto Books.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (2020). Touching feeling: Affect, pedagogy, performativity (Original work published 2003). Duke University Press.
Tudor, Alyosxa (2026). Right-wing times: Fascism, left/right convergences and the relationship of ‘gender-critical’ to anti-gender. In Clare Hemmings & Sumi Madhok (Eds.), Transnational anti-gender politics and resistance. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Spring issue.
