400021 SE Feeling Feminist Methodologies: Affect, Emotions and Cultivating Ways of Knowing (2024S)

Lehrender: Michael Orsini

This course explores the myriad methodological debates and advances in feminist methodologies that have affective sensibilities, with a keen attention to how emotions and affects have been addressed or neglected in research, and how bringing feminist methodologies attuned to affect and emotions challenges conventional understandings of rationality and power. While there are competing definitions of affect and emotion, we will begin from the premise that while important, these debates can sometimes obscure rather than illuminate the field. Thinking methodologically with both affect and emotion will provide a more expansive understanding of their sociality. Feminist inquiry has been transformed as a result of its engagement with intersectionality and its emphasis on how interlocking forms of oppression grounded in race, class, disability and gender structure societies. These axes of identity are also highly emotional and affective, such that feelings about racial others have important effects, as do feelings about disability. A methodological approach to feminist inquiry that is grounded in affective experience, then, must account for the emotional landscapes that govern these intersections.