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

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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.