'Essaying Affect: the contemporary essay as a place of affective possibility'

我的研究展现了当代散文和跨大西洋“情感理论”的共同形式、关注点和背景。关注女性的文章，特别是自2010年以来写的酷儿女性，我感兴趣的是散文形式在参与和表演情感中的使用方式，以及试图将各种“自我”的调节形式化（或拒绝形式化）。在我对“影响理论”的理解中，我从20世纪90年代的女权主义学者Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick，Judith Butler和其他人的叙述中开始，这些学者产生了一种集中关注性别，性和性的工作传统。后来的许多情感理论都要求注意它自己的正式参与。例如，Sara Ahmed、Lauren Berlant、Kathleen Stewart、José Esteban Muñoz和C.赖利·斯诺顿以不同的方式探索了历史、政治和物质时刻的情感张力。在关注女性、酷儿和跨性别影响的同时，这部作品援引了一个反身的“我”，或者以一种强调作品理论关注的方式暗示了它自己的情感表现。我认为，这些冲动是散文性的，不仅仅是对散文这一时刻的说明，而是深深地嵌入到当代的形式实例中。正如2020年的学术选集《论散文》（托马斯·卡珊和凯瑟琳·墨菲主编）所指出的那样：“也许是因为它是一种文学学术所定义的写作形式，关于散文传统的工作出奇地少。”我的研究深入到这种紧张关系，把像玛吉纳尔逊，莫伊拉戴维，克劳迪娅兰金，爱默生惠特尼和安德烈龙朱在关系和接近学术界的作家的工作。他们的作品将理论融入文章，引用并将学术嵌入其情感和自我的构建和表现中。这些调用与接收和出版的共享文学学术空间密切相关：从大学的物理空间，到期刊，杂志，赠款申请，通讯和社交媒体提要。可以预见的是，对社交媒体和在线出版等空间的研究还处于萌芽状态;这一领域中大部分最受关注的工作都是在被批评的空间中进行的，这是我的研究再次发现和探索的一个结。我对论文和理论的方法都是由“不确定性”的想法驱动的：不完整的实例和实践，以及对不可避免地拒绝解决的二元和二元论的担忧。在这篇文章中，我读到了上面讨论过的情感理论家，以及更广泛和不断发展的酷儿理论，跨性别奖学金，批判种族理论，以及语言，性和性别的建构主义和解构主义理论。这些交叉领域处于当代性别和性讨论的最前沿，理论和更多的散文写作都在上面讨论的空间中传播和辩论，以及在行动主义的前线。

My research plays out the shared forms, concerns, and contexts of the contemporary essay and transatlantic 'affect theory'. Focusing on essays by women, particularly queer women, written since 2010, I'm interested in the ways in which the essay form has been put to use in engaging and performing affect, and in attempting to formalise (or indeed refusing to formalise) various modulations of 'self'. In my understanding of 'affect theory', I proceed from the accounts given by feminist scholars such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler and others in the 1990s, which have born a tradition of work centrally concerned with gender, sex, and sexuality. Much of this later affect theory calls attention to its own formal engagements. For instance, the work of Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Kathleen Stewart, José Esteban Muñoz, and C. Riley Snorton has, in different ways, explored the affective tensions of historical, political, and material moments. While attending to feminine, queer, and trans affects, this work has invoked a reflexive 'I', or otherwise gestured to its own affective performances in such a way as to underscore the work's theoretical concerns. These impulses are, I argue, essayistic, and not just illustrative of this moment of the essay, but deeply embedded in contemporary instances of the form.The essay as a form is remarkably under-studied. As the 2020 scholarly anthology, On Essays (ed. Thomas Karshan and Kathryn Murphy) notes: 'perhaps because it is a form of writing against which literary scholarship has defined itself, there has been surprisingly little work on the tradition of the essay'. My research digs into this tension, placing the work of writers like Maggie Nelson, Moyra Davey, Claudia Rankine, Emerson Whitney, and Andrea Long-Chu in relation and proximity to academia. Their work reads theory into the essay, quoting and embedding scholarship into its constructions and performances of affect and self. These invocations are intimately related to shared literary-academic spaces of reception and publication: from the physical space of the university, to journals, magazines, grant applications, newsletters, and social media feeds. The study of spaces such as social media and online publishing is, predictably, nascent; much of the most engaged work in this area is performed in same spaces as are being critiqued, a knot which again, my research picks up and probes.My approach to both the essay and theory is driven by the idea of 'attempt': by instances and practices of incompletion, and by the worrying of binaries and dualisms that inevitably refuse to resolve. In this, I read from the affect theorists discussed above, as well as a much wider and ever-evolving body of queer theory, trans scholarship, critical race theory, and constructionist and deconstructionist theories of language, sex and gender. These intersecting fields are at the forefront of contemporary discussions around gender and sex, with both theory and more essayistic writing being disseminated and debated across the spaces discussed above, as well as on the front lines of activism.