Ann Cvetkovich - Böcker

In this bold new work of cultural criticism, Ann Cvetkovich develops a queer approach to trauma. She argues for the importance of recognizing-and archiving-accounts of trauma that belong as much to the ordinary and everyday as to the domain of catastrophe. An Archive of Feelings contends that the field of trauma studies, limited by too strict a division between the public and the private, has overlooked the experiences of women and queers. Rejecting the pathologizing understandings of trauma that permeate medical and clinical discourses on the subject, Cvetkovich develops instead a sex-positive approach missing even from most feminist work on trauma. She challenges the field to engage more fully with sexual trauma and the wide range of feelings in its vicinity, including those associated with butch-femme sex and aids activism and caretaking. An Archive of Feelings brings together oral histories from lesbian activists involved in act up/New York; readings of literature by Dorothy Allison, Leslie Feinberg, CherrÍe Moraga, and Shani Mootoo; videos by Jean Carlomusto and Pratibha Parmar; and performances by Lisa Kron, Carmelita Tropicana, and the bands Le Tigre and Tribe 8. Cvetkovich reveals how activism, performance, and literature give rise to public cultures that work through trauma and transform the conditions producing it. By looking closely at connections between sexuality, trauma, and the creation of lesbian public cultures, Cvetkovich makes those experiences that have been pushed to the peripheries of trauma culture the defining principles of a new construction of sexual trauma-one in which trauma catalyzes the creation of cultural archives and political communities.

This book explores how discourses of the local, the particular, the everyday, and the situated are being transformed by new discourses of globalization and transnationalism, as used both by government and business and in critical academic discourse. Unlike other studies that have focused on the politics and economics of globalization, Articulating

Political Emotions explores the contributions that the study of discourses, rhetoric, and framing of emotion make to understanding the public sphere, civil society and the political realm. Tackling critiques on the opposition of the public and private spheres, chapters in this volume examine why some sentiments are valued in public communication while others are judged irrelevant, and consider how sentiments mobilize political trajectories.Emerging from the work of the Public Feelings research group at the University of Texas-Austin, and cohering in a New Agendas in Communication symposium, this volume brings together the work of young scholars from various areas of study, including sociology, gender studies, anthropology, art, and new media. The essays in this collection formulate new ways of thinking about the relations among the emotional, the cultural, and the political. Contributors recraft familiar ways of doing critical work, and bring forward new analyses of emotions in politics. Their work expands understanding of the role of emotion in the political realm, and will be influential in political communication, political science, sociology, and visual and cultural studies.

Political Emotions explores the contributions that the study of discourses, rhetoric, and framing of emotion make to understanding the public sphere, civil society and the political realm. Tackling critiques on the opposition of the public and private spheres, chapters in this volume examine why some sentiments are valued in public communication while others are judged irrelevant, and consider how sentiments mobilize political trajectories.Emerging from the work of the Public Feelings research group at the University of Texas-Austin, and cohering in a New Agendas in Communication symposium, this volume brings together the work of young scholars from various areas of study, including sociology, gender studies, anthropology, art, and new media. The essays in this collection formulate new ways of thinking about the relations among the emotional, the cultural, and the political. Contributors recraft familiar ways of doing critical work, and bring forward new analyses of emotions in politics. Their work expands understanding of the role of emotion in the political realm, and will be influential in political communication, political science, sociology, and visual and cultural studies.

This book explores how discourses of the local, the particular, the everyday, and the situated are being transformed by new discourses of globalization and transnationalism, as used both by government and business and in critical academic discourse. Unlike other studies that have focused on the politics and economics of globalization, Articulating the Global and the Local highlights the importance of culture and provides models for a cultural studies that addresses globalization and the dialectic of local and global forces. Arguing for the inseparability of global and local analysis, the book demonstrates how global forces enter into local situations and how in turn global relations are articulated through local events, identities, and cultures; it includes studies of a wide range of cultural forms including sports, poetry, pedagogy, ecology, dance, cities, and democracy. Articulating the Global and the Local makes the ambitious claim that the category of the local transforms the debate about globalization by redefining what counts as global culture. Central to the essays are the new global and translocal cultures and identities created by the diasporic processes of colonialism and decolonization. The essays explore a variety of local, national, and transnational contexts with particular attention to race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality as categories that force us to rethink globalization itself.

In Depression: A Public Feeling, Ann Cvetkovich combines memoir and critical essay in search of ways of writing about depression as a cultural and political phenomenon that offer alternatives to medical models. She describes her own experience of the professional pressures, creative anxiety, and political hopelessness that led to intellectual blockage while she was finishing her dissertation and writing her first book. Building on the insights of the memoir, in the critical essay she considers the idea that feeling bad constitutes the lived experience of neoliberal capitalism. Cvetkovich draws on an unusual archive, including accounts of early Christian acedia and spiritual despair, texts connecting the histories of slavery and colonialism with their violent present-day legacies, and utopian spaces created from lesbian feminist practices of crafting. She herself seeks to craft a queer cultural analysis that accounts for depression as a historical category, a felt experience, and a point of entry into discussions about theory, contemporary culture, and everyday life. Depression: A Public Feeling suggests that utopian visions can reside in daily habits and practices, such as writing and yoga, and it highlights the centrality of somatic and felt experience to political activism and social transformation.

In Depression: A Public Feeling, Ann Cvetkovich combines memoir and critical essay in search of ways of writing about depression as a cultural and political phenomenon that offer alternatives to medical models. She describes her own experience of the professional pressures, creative anxiety, and political hopelessness that led to intellectual blockage while she was finishing her dissertation and writing her first book. Building on the insights of the memoir, in the critical essay she considers the idea that feeling bad constitutes the lived experience of neoliberal capitalism. Cvetkovich draws on an unusual archive, including accounts of early Christian acedia and spiritual despair, texts connecting the histories of slavery and colonialism with their violent present-day legacies, and utopian spaces created from lesbian feminist practices of crafting. She herself seeks to craft a queer cultural analysis that accounts for depression as a historical category, a felt experience, and a point of entry into discussions about theory, contemporary culture, and everyday life. Depression: A Public Feeling suggests that utopian visions can reside in daily habits and practices, such as writing and yoga, and it highlights the centrality of somatic and felt experience to political activism and social transformation.

This special issue of GLQ celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Gayle Rubin’s groundbreaking essay, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” Credited with inaugurating the contemporary field of sexuality studies, Rubin’s essay calls for an “autonomous theory and politics specific to sexuality.” Looking at the intellectual and political gains of sexual freedom movements over the past two decades, “Rethinking Sex” explores the critical and activist afterlife of the controversial 1982 Barnard College Conference on Sexuality, where Rubin originally presented the essay. In her contribution to this special issue, Rubin reflects on her earlier essay and examines developments in “pro-sex” feminism since the publication of “Thinking Sex.” Other noted scholars assess the significance of Rubin’s work for histories of sexuality and for new areas in queer studies, such as transgender studies, disability studies, and transnational studies. In honoring Rubin’s scholarship, the contributors address the history of sexual theory and politics and the forms that they might take in the twenty-first century.