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

我的研究展示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。专注于女性，尤其是酷儿女性，自2010年以来写的文章，我对文章形式在参与和表现情感方面的使用方式很感兴趣，并试图将“自我”的各种调整形式化（或者实际上拒绝形式化）。在我对“情感理论”的理解中，我从女权主义学者（如Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick， Judith Butler等人）在20世纪90年代所做的描述出发，他们产生了一种以性别、性和性为中心的工作传统。这些后来的影响理论的大部分内容都让人们注意到它自己的正式约定。例如，萨拉·艾哈迈德、劳伦·伯兰特、凯瑟琳·斯图尔特、约瑟·埃斯特班Muñoz和c·莱利·斯诺顿的作品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、酷儿和跨性别情感的同时，这部作品唤起了一个自反的“我”，或者以其他方式表达了它自己的情感表现，以强调作品的理论关注。我认为，这些冲动是散文式的，不仅说明了散文的这一刻，而且深深植根于当代形式的实例中。作为一种写作形式，文章的研究明显不足。正如2020年出版的学术选集《论随笔》（Thomas Karshan和Kathryn Murphy编著）所指出的那样：“也许是因为随笔是一种文学学术定义自己的写作形式，令人惊讶的是，关于随笔传统的研究很少。”我的研究深入研究了这种紧张关系，将玛吉·纳尔逊、莫伊拉·戴维、克劳迪娅·兰金、爱默生·惠特尼和安德里亚·龙楚等作家的作品与学术界联系起来。他们的作品将理论融入到文章中，引用并将学术融入到文章的结构和情感与自我的表现中。这些调用与共享的文学-学术接收和出版空间密切相关：从大学的物理空间到期刊，杂志，拨款申请，新闻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刚刚起步；在这一领域中，许多最引人入胜的工作都是在被批评的相同空间中进行的，我的研究再次抓住并探索了这个问题。我对论文和理论的处理方式都是由“尝试”这个概念驱动的：通过不完成的实例和实践，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，我阅读了上文讨论的情感理论，以及更广泛和不断发展的酷儿理论、跨性别学术、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。这些交叉的领域是当代关于性别和性的讨论的前沿，理论和更多的散文式写作在上述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.